Group creation

[330467]

I have a course which has almost 200 students, is it possible to create groups automatically adding students to specific groups, not just split them randomly into groups.  For example;  all students in the course belong to different years and need to be split into groups year 1, year 2, etc in the course.  Does this have to be done manually?

Regards, Kerrie.

[jonesn16 · Accepted solution]

I don't think Canvas would have a way to separate the students by year and then randomly sort. Doing 200 students one at a time sucks (I have manually sorted that many students by hand into groups, so I feel for you), but it can be cranked out in under 30 minutes.

Another option might be to create the groups and allow self-sign up, then instruct the students to add themselves to the correct group for their year. Even if not every student does it, that can drastically reduce the number of students you'd have to sort yourself.

[330467]

Thank you.  I'll pass that on to the lecturer.

[ericwerth]

Hi 330467  It might be worth contacting someone in your IT (?) department who works with feeds that may be coming from your student information system.  If there is some type of denotation in the data stream that indicates the year of the student, perhaps they can be put into "sections" (https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10770 ) within the course automatically.  I'm not sure if different sections would do what you need, but I know that I have been pleasantly surprised with what the person in our IT department is able to do with course enrollments.  

This may be a dead end up it might be worth asking!