Only specific instructors for groups

[a1063023]

If you teach a course with 300 students and 20 instructors (usually 1 teacher, plus TAs, but also 1 teacher plus project supervisors), it is normal to break students up into groups.

Unfortunately, each group carries over EVERY SINGLE instructor from the course into the group, making things like announcements completely useless since they are broadcast to every TA/instructor in the entire course. We literally have to instruct our students to never use the "Announcements" functionality within their group page.

Desired interface: after a group is created, there should be a way to specify which course instructor(s) are assigned to a group. (And via the API too, please.)

Besides cutting down on spam through the Announcements feature, this would be very useful to be able to easily look up each group's instructor from within Canvas itself — currently this needs to be done using an external spreadsheet, say.

[Stef_retired]

@a1063023 

Thanks for sharing this idea. Groups in Canvas are designed to accommodate collaborative activity among a set students. Schools usually assign specific instructors to a set of students by creating sections in large courses. Have you investigated this solution?

[a1063023]

Hi Stefanie, thanks for the reply. We use these groups for students to submit group reports. In a University setting we are talking about 50–100 groups for classes of 200–600 students. Sections are generally created in sync with our timetabling system, so all students in tutorial N are in section N, etc.

For your suggested approach to work, are you saying we would have to create a section for every group in the course? That seems clunky, especially given the fact that there is no user interface to create sections (at least as far as I know it needs to be done by admin).

[a1063023]

Following up, I've just spoken to our internal Canvas support desk, and the way Sections are set up currently in our institution they are fed directly from our internal timetabling system, and we cannot alter sections or add more. Furthermore, our Sections also have the same problem of having all instructors allocated to all sections and this does not appear to be customisable. I'll discuss this in parallel with our admin team but for the time being I don't think using Sections is a viable workaround to the limitations of the Groups.

[Stef_retired]

@a1063023 Thanks for looking into this. Since the intention of the idea is consistent with the inherent collaborative nature of groups, we'll move this forward for broader discussion.

[nwilson7]

We have the same request from many co-taught courses.  We have gone in a "double rostered" students so they are in the section fed by our SIS and then a section that connects them to either their lead instructor or an instructor.  This helps but changing the ability to pick which instructors are attached to groups would help a lot.

[KristinL]

Thank you for sharing this idea with the Instructure Community!

The Product Team reviewed all feature proposals recently, and unfortunately, this thread was identified as one that they would not be able to include in their current or future plans. While we appreciate your proposal, we also want to be transparent about the likelihood of something like this making it to production.

Thank you for collaborating, and we hope that you submit another idea in the future!