Restrict Students in Crosslisted Sections to Only View Own Section By Default

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OK, I know this is an old suggestion, but I'm going to bring it up again. I know that teachers can do this on an individual basis, but the number of clicks this takes for a crosslisted course would take an instructor hours.

The idea of allowing students in a crosslisted section able to see students other sections by default is completely at odds with FERPA. The default setting should be that students are NOT able to see sections other than their own. Since this is not the case, I'd like to put this forward as a suggestion, or I really like a thorough explanation for why it hasn't been implemented. Don't send me to the link that said this suggestion didn't have enough support. This isn't something that would take a lot of work to implement.

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jmurray6
Community Participant

I don't know about the thoughts on the Instructure side of things, but as a Canvas admin at my institution - this is highly dependent upon how the institution uses the feature. If this were to switch it would break the way we use Canvas as we ONLY crosslist sections that are technically the same course that meets with the same instructor at the same time (and students are only in separate sections because our SIS requires separate sections either for billing or delivery format purposes) and thus we NEED to have students in crosslisted sections be able to see and interact with each other by default.

Example:  SOC-2013-101 / 101C / 101R / 11RC - Section 101 are students attending in the classroom. Section 101C are high school concurrent students (different billing codes in our SIS) attending that class in the classroom. Section 101R are students attending that class meeting through Zoom - we call this format "Live Online" (but it's a different delivery format and thus requires a different coding for scheduling in our SIS and thus requires a new section). Section 11RC are high school concurrent students attending through zoom (now two different coding requirements in our SIS requiring its own section).  However, all of these sections are actually "sub-sections" of "Section 1" of SOC-2013 that meets M-W from 9:30-10:45 with the same instructor (Me) that I manage as a single "section/instance" (class) of SOC-2013, so there is a global crosslist "cap" of 30 seats, but those 30 seats can be filled from any combination of those different "sub-sections" as long as the total of those sub-sections does not exceed 30. But they're all one class and thus need to interact with each other in Canvas as a single class.

Since I teach multiple "instances/classes" of this course - that meet at different times (with a few of them being fully online) we have separate Canvas courses for each of these classes. So, section 102 (and all of it's different sub-sections) is a separate Canvas course. Section 501 (and all of it's subsections - which is the fully online class) has it's own Canvas course. There is no "master" SOC-2013 course for all of the different classes.

We have hundreds of these type of situations every semester, so if they couldn't see each other by default that means someone - likely the main canvas admin (also me) - would have to go through thousands of records to "turn on" the ability of students to see each other in the crosslisted sections - which would take me weeks to do across 900 or so sections in 500 or so classes 

It sounds like your institution uses the crosslist feature differently. Where you have multiple different "classes" as sections all crosslited in a "master course" of the same content.  Example:  SOC-2013 is the overall "master course,"  Section 01 as 1 class with one meeting time, Section 02 as a 2nd class with a second meeting time, etc. . . so they're separate classes sharing one Canvas Course to access the same material.  

Thus the only possible solution I could see is if there is a global setting to set the default crosslisted behavior. Either allowing crosslisted sections to see each other by default (what my institution needs) or disallowing crosslisted sections to see each other by default (what it sounds like your institution would want).

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
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jbarr
Community Explorer
@jmurray6  wrote:

"It sounds like your institution uses the crosslist feature differently. Where you have multiple different "classes" as sections all crosslited in a "master course" of the same content.  Example:  SOC-2013 is the overall "master course,"  Section 01 as 1 class with one meeting time, Section 02 as a 2nd class with a second meeting time, etc. . . so they're separate classes sharing one Canvas Course to access the same material."

What you described is exactly what we are doing. Our classes are so similar being in a K-12 environment, that it makes no sense for a teacher to curate material for multiple sections, and trying to teach the blueprint function to middle school teachers would be very cruel and highly unusual.

@jmurray6  wrote:

Thus the only possible solution I could see is if there is a global setting to set the default crosslisted behavior. Either allowing crosslisted sections to see each other by default (what my institution needs) or disallowing crosslisted sections to see each other by default (what it sounds like your institution would want).

This is exactly what we want.

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
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