Creating Communities on Canvas Using Groups

[adrury1]

Hello all, I'm working on making a community homepage for our residential communities with the goal of having a 'virtual community' for all residents, as well as smaller building-specific communities for every physical community we have.  We plan to add all residents to one central homeroom and I am currently looking for the best way to create smaller communities within that one homeroom. Does anyone have experience with this and would you be willing to share how you approached this? Does it make sense to create a group set with a group for each community, or is there a better way? For reference, we'll have 2-2,500 students utilizing these home pages and 15 smaller communities. We're hoping that each smaller community will be able to have their own virtual 'space' within the course. Any thoughts/ideas/feedback would be greatly appreciated! 

[KristinL]

Hi Angela ~

Depending on what you'd like to do within those smaller communities, this could work by using Sections to organize the students into their cohorts. All pages/resources would be seen by everyone enrolled, but you could use discussions and assignments to engage specific students.

How do I edit sections for an enrollment in a course?‌

How do I assign an assignment to a course section?‌

Another option would be to use Groups within the course. It's a little bit more to set up as each group could have a unique home page, branching out from the main course, but I think it could work for you too.

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-26441-how-do-i-manually-create-groups-in-a-group-set 

How do I view content and student activity within a group as an instructor?  

[adrury1]

Thank you! We're still working to figure out groups and sections when it comes to permissions and shared content. 

We began by setting up groups but I wasn't able to find a way to make it so only some people could edit the group pages (we thought we could limit it to teacher/student leader). We planned on having a home page for each community that lived in their group, but it seems like there's no hierarchy/approval in a group format, unless anyone knows a work-around.  

We're currently exploring having the homepages live on the main course and then have them link to the group discussions/announcements and/or exploring the idea of sections this weekend. It's definitely a trial and error process 🙂