Make Group Assignments Respect Sections

[johnpj]

Idea:

Include an option in the People tool to create a group for each section.

Problem:

It is very labor intensive to add a whole section of students to a group (some of our sections have 300+ students)

Use Cases:

Instructor needs to share select resources with a section

Instructor needs to have discussions available to specific section

Instructor needs to share Content Pages with a specific section

Instructor needs to conference with a specific section

Mockup:

Implementation Consideration:

• The groups would need to stay synchronized as section membership is updated
• Would need to account for the case where a section is added after the Groups were setup

NOTE: This is a more tightly scoped request based on the thinking from More section control for group creation

[sworrell]

Agreed. We would just like to make announcements to individual sections that meet on different days and such.

[Renee_Carney]

Hi  @sworrell ​

I believe you may be looking for this idea? 

This idea is currently archived, but it is on the radar of the product team.  Bookmark and Follow it to receive updates as they are available.

[spiros_loukopou]

Hi Renee!

I think having section-specific actions embedded (native) to the construction of any assignment, announcement, group buildout, etc. would prove to be incredibly useful. Seems like there is a lot of discussion of about section-based actions in the community.

It's something our back-end developers are investigating, too.

[allison]

Thanks everyone for your conversation around this idea. It's something I see us circling back to when we look at overall improvements to collaboration and group work in Canvas. For now, I will archive for future consideration.

[johnpj]

If a feature request with such widespread appeal and obvious value can not get approved then I think this process of community input and voting is seriously flawed. I've tried to be a champion of this process at our institution and our peer institutions, but I can't in good conscious devote time to a process that rarely result in any return value.

[jthoms]

Darn, that's disappointing!

I would suggest that collaboration and group work isn't the only way to frame the issue. Users honestly get quite confused over the difference between groups and sections, as each feature offers different advantages (which was largely the point of this whole thread).

The bigger feature ask would be to take a step back from groups and sections and take stock of how institutions and teachers structure their courses and groupwork. The ideas in this thread would be a great starting point!

[sworrell]

I really need a way to direct announcements to different sections of a master course. I can't believe a feature like this wouldn't be unbelievably help to instructors of courses with multiple sections/periods.

Simple dropdown menu in announcements with "all students", sections 1, section 2, etc would be very helpful as I don't teach just one section of any course.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Hi, looks like Allison is no longer with Instructure?  I am wondering if there is anyone working on the improved collaboration and group work that she mentioned.  Agreed, this is very important!

Nancy

[Renee_Carney]

 @Nancy_Webb_CCSF ​

You are correct, Allison is off on her next big adventure!  But, that's not why this idea hasn't been updated!  This idea is still on the radar of the product team, and it will receive an update when one is available!

[michael9]

I agree -- this seems like such an obvious feature.

[michael9]

At my place of work, we have teachers who wish to collaborate. They want content to essentially be the same for all students, but they each have their own section, and  would like to be able to perform various activities (send announcements, grade, create groups, display content)  by section. That does not seem to be the case at present. For instance, I'm trying to create groups for my section, and can't, so instead of that wonderful group-making-tool, I have to manually drag a multitude of students, one at a time, into groups. It's fine for the first 30 students, but after about 100 or so it gets to be a little tedious.

[spiros_loukopou]

I understand the technical roadblocks and protecting the production team (I can imagine a number of us having basic PMP know-how), but steam-rolling 192 voters on a well responded to idea is a bit rough. There is clearly demand, as seen by the well-surpassed threshold, for a feature that enables section-specific task management. Is there a real, tangible target-date on this?

[sworrell]

Open this back up for consideration! Many (most) teachers require the ability to direct content like announcements to individual sections. Right now we have to use another tool outside of the LMS for this which is annoying. Thanks

[michael9]

Here, here! I feel confident that most teachers -- each of whom will be teaching one or more sections of a course -- will need, on occasion if not frequently, to communicate with individual sections. It is a genuine puzzlement to me how the people who gather user requirements for Canvas were not made aware of this by their end-users (us).

[sworrell]

"It's something our back-end developers are investigating" Glad to hear!

[blettiere]

Is there any more discussion on this?  I have several teachers wondering why they can't make groups from one section.  I have to look at 75 students from 3 different sections.  I love that group work can exist across section, but I don't understand why we can't look at one section when creating groups.  I would love to be able to vote on this and see if we can't convince someone to make the change.

[spn322]

This would be so great. I hope this will be a feature in the future. We are placing 350 BA
students within 6 different Groups on every BA course, every semester. The teachers need closed working Spaces and the only way to go, is doing it manually. All students are transferred to canvas in the correct sections. If just we had a bottom to transfer the sections into Groups. It would be a bliss.  

[johnpj]

The University of Michigan has created a script that runs in OpenShift that creates groups based on sections. It's a far cry from having this functionality native in Canvas, but we thought it important enough in which to spend the development resources. We will make it publically available in early fall.

[dknapp]

 @sworrell ​ - I couldn't agree more. This really needs to be opened back up for voting and further discussion. We cross list many courses and really need the ability to randomly assign students to X groups per section, maintaining section boundaries.

[dknapp]

Are there any new updates on where this feature request is with the product team? Will this feature request be re-opened?