Help Us Explore New Group Options

[SamGarza1]

We're exploring new possibilities for Canvas Group functionality, including the option for private groups and we'd love your input! Below, you'll find a Maze Survey with a few questions to help us understand how you'd envision this feature working. This survey should take no more than 5 -10 mins to complete. 

https://t.maze.co/271118947 

Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts!

[HeatherHarris2]

Thank you! We need a way to group students and assign things to that group, but without all the course options and group membership visibility.  It would be wonderful if only the teacher could see who is in the group and use the group as a differentiation tool, without the ability for students to create materials, etc.

[Mikee]

Is there a way I can like this post more than once? ❤️ 

[nuscitpkg]

I did the survey halfway and stopped.

Surely there are more pressing issues and gaps with Groups than this?

For example:

• No open and close date/time for group signup. (This is a very big thing in my institution as our previous LMS had it.)
• No way to define the instructors' membership for each group. For large courses with multiple sections, instructors teach only certain sections. Groups tend to be within sections (e.g. for project work), but all the instructors are in all of the groups and there is no way to selectively remove them.
• No bulk management tools for groups e.g. bulk rename, bulk delete.

Also, just a comment about Groups' user interface - lecturers are not aware how Groups look to students. They would assume that the Course and the Group Set is visible to students. So, they give generic names such as Project Group 1, Project Group 2... etc.

However, students see only the Group name, especially if they go via Groups from the Global Navigation Menu. There is no context - no indication which Course or which Group Set the Group belongs to.

I think these are more important things to address, rather than private groups. Although I am sure someone has a use case for private groups. I'd love to hear from those who see this as a great need so that I can understand what this is about.

I think elucidating this will also help those doing the survey. I'm not going to distribute the survey to teaching staff when I don't have context why this has been chosen by Instructure as a priority and what need this proposed feature fulfils.

[chriscas]

Hi @SamGarza1,

I'm trying to understand the functionality here, and I think the naming might just be confusing me...

Is the goal of these "groups" (putting in quotes because I'm not sure that's what I would call this) to allow faculty to create what I'll call subsets or subsections or students to assign things to in a quick way, without having any collaboration functionality?  If so, this would be great!   Could you clarify this here at all, as it would be super beneficial for me and might help others as they complete the survey.  I'm hopeful this is the functionality you're going for, as I know it's been a very common ask for years now.

-Chris

[Mikee]

We have need for non-visible student groups, and as all groups are published to student view of the 'people' page with their members, courses that have self-grouped assignments cannot have a non student-visible group without some form of un-viewed grouping. Some of our courses are well over 2,000 students, so compartmentalisation is essential. 

Does that help your understanding @chriscas ?

[KateHilton]

We used to have something like this in an old system and with large cohorts it made life very easy. The ability to:

• administrate students into seeing things at particular times,
• assign marking to staff and
• enable large cohorts with reasonable proportions of students with disabilities who receive extra time to be managed from one "group" 

has been essential for us. Having this in Canvas going forward will save a lot of problems.

[audra_agnelly]

Not the info you've asked for, but since you opened this conversation...

1. Ability to enable self-sign ups without showing the entire course roster to students
2. Ability to set a front page in the groups space like we can in Courses. Ability to disable some of the features in the group space like with can with course navigation in a regular course.
3. Fewer clicks for teachers to get to the group pages
4. Permissions to include Observers in Group announcements and inbox messages. I know Canvas has designed Groups for collaboration, but for lack of a better tool, Groups get used to differentiate instruction and in K-12 it's important for parents to receive those communications.
5. Enhancements to use groups for differentiated instruction. Support always tells staff to use sections, but sections come from our SIS and the permission to create sections is turned off. While work can be assigned to Groups, there are issues with this when using external tool assignments.

[dkpst5]

Building on @audra_agnelly's #5: Granular section permissions is the way to go. We institutionally (I'm an admin) forbid section things because of SIS sync, but we'd love to expose "create and work with non-SIS sections" to teachers. But, from what we've found, there aren't granular permissions to that. It's all or nothing for section work. We'd like to keep SIS-linked sections set in stone, but allow teachers to create their own sections within a course for internal organization.

I think it's REALLY important to keep the "groups are for collaboration, sections are for organization" distinction that Canvas has. I've worked with other LMSs that muddied the two and it's not pretty.

[chriscas]

I wholeheartedly agree with @dkpst5 about keeping "groups" terminology for collaboration and "sections" for organization.  That's what actually prompted my first comment here, because I'm still not 100% sure if this is actually the organization/sections thing I'm hoping it is, or something else.

I know Groups means many things to many different people, but inside the LMS, I think it needs to have a more singular meaning.  I'd rather train faculty on what a group is vs what a section or subsection or whatever that would get named, rather than having two completely different things called groups, which will make internal support, as well as community posts, and the overall user experience just more confusing in my opinion.

I definitely would support this kind of organization thing, whether it's through more granular permissions with existing section functionality, or some new additions.  With that being said, we definitely cannot have modifications being made to SIS sections at all.  We also cannot have teachers putting custom access dates on sections, and we probably would only want them used for organizing students in existing sections, not being able to add new people to them.  All of these wants for my institution is why I've always been calling these things subsections, though I know that terminology isn't quite right either because these things might have some students form section A and some from section B, etc...  Back to the drawing board for my own naming suggestions I suppose!

-Chris

[audra_agnelly]

@dkpst5 @chriscas Fair points. My staff have fallen back on Groups for differentiation for lack of another way to do this in their Canvas courses. I'm not tied to Groups being the way to do this and it's certainly not ideal, but teachers need someway to be able to create reusable cohorts for differentiating assignments and communication in Canvas other than the time consuming task of selecting each student individually in the Assign To settings or the Inbox.

If Groups continue to be used for collaborative work and some other mechanism is used for differentiation, I don't know that I see a use case for the "Private Groups" proposed in the Maze survey.

[mskoch]

I have completed the survey, but want to join others to share my wish list relating to Groups as well now that Canvas is paying some attention to the Groups tool.

1. Private groups would be so much more useful if Groups are supported in the Assign To tool. Please add Groups as an option to Assign To. 
2. Allow group sets to carry over when importing a course to another (i.e. at least non-manually generated ones), either by default of as an option. This has tripped up so many instructors, even experienced ones, years after years, especially in group discussions. It is very much still a pain point but has been overshadowed by newer and bigger pain points.
3. If groups for a group set were generated with one of the auto options (i.e. x number of groups or groups of x number of students), please automatically put new students in a group. This would save so much time when a course has a different group set for each discussion. 

2 and 3 are functions that our previous LMS had and were badly missed when we moved to Canvas in 2016. The current import behavior (e.g. imported group discussions defaulting to an empty "Project Group") is neither intuitive or logical - and this is now made worse by the new Discussion Redesign interface. 

[dkpst5]

As a note, Groups currently can be used for Assign To -- when the assignment is group work. This is part of what I mentioned above about the importance of the distinction of "Group" and "Section". I would love to see some of the group generation functionality (size, automatic) added to sections (alongside section permission granularity). Mixing the two will lead to issues (FERPA-violating issues).

The utility I'm reading in this proposed update is for (mostly with large enrollment courses) students not knowing they are participating in a group discussion or being able to see the long list of other groups in a course.

[JamesSekcienski]

@dkpst5 I agree with trying to keep the distinction between groups and sections.  It also seems like it would make more sense to try to approach it from sections since sections are already supported for assignment and module differentiation now.  Considering the challenges with permissions, in my opinion it would probably help to make "Private" groups based on sections, since in their current state sections are closer to the desired behavior than groups.  The other thing to consider is how LTIs would handle these.  Keeping that distinction seems important to help ensure consistent handling/interpretation by Partners too.

I also like the idea of granular permissions to be able to separate the controls of SIS sections vs non-SIS sections.  To build on this and related to what @chriscas mentioned, it would be nice if these "Private" groups were essentially sub-sections.  These could have a setting to keep them hidden from students.  These also wouldn't require the addition of new sections which may affect existing reporting/auditing tools and scripts schools have built.  These could also have their own permission set that admins could allow teachers to manage the enrollments of without affecting the enrollment for the overall section itself.  It would also be nice if these sub-sections could have their own access dates too (with the ability for admins to restrict who can set/update these dates), so sub-sections could be used to extend access to a course for select students that need to finish work for Incompletes and/or just an instructor(s) that need extended time to grade.  There would be the limitation that students from different sections can't be added to the same sub-section.  However, since this isn't for students to interact with each other directly anyway, it would still be an improvement to assign multiple sub-sections for differentiation rather than going through all the individual students.

I also noted in my response that it would be nice to be able to set quiz accommodations by these "Private" groups that can automatically apply to quizzes.  This would likely be its own long-term project, but would be a nice added feature in the future.

In addition, I shared that the self-enrollment option for "Private" groups could be useful when building content to provide student choice.  Certain assignments/modules could be assigned to only select "Private" groups.  Then students could sign-up for the "Private" group that corresponds to the assignment(s)/module(s) they want to complete and automatically get the corresponding assignment(s)/module(s) assigned to them.

I also agree with @mskoch that it would be nice to be able to import Group Sets too when copying courses.  Similarly, it would be nice to have the option to import these "Private" group set-ups, and corresponding "Assign To" settings.  It would be nice to set up this differentiation within a blueprint and have it sync with the differentiation already configured so students only need to be added to the appropriate "Private" group and all the blueprint based "Assign To" would be ready to go.  However, this seems like a long-term project if feasible, especially to handle importing corresponding "Assign To" settings.

[marco_divittori]

Regardless of whether this feature is implemented using Groups or Sections, I dislike the use of the word "private" in the name. You can have awareness of being in a private vs open group whereas with this feature, students would have no indicators that they are in a group. I'm glad to see a question about this in the survey as I feel that a word like "hidden" better represents the functionality.

[jmerlenbach2]

I do see this as more similar to a sub-section as opposed to a group, and I, like others, don't mind calling these entirely not groups. However, I am hesitant to through my weight behind these using the section workflow.

We have had lengthy discussions about sections and making custom sections in courses in Canvas, and have ultimately been unable to meet this need for faculty members because there is an enrollment tied to a section. If we manually create these sections in a course, enroll students in them, and then the student is dropped from SIS, the enrollment in that manual section causes the student to get stuck in the course.

If these sub-sections could be created in such a way that the enrollment was dropped in the event that all "true section" enrollments were dropped, and there was a breaking out of permissions that could allow faculty members to create and manage these sub-sections without the ability to create and manage "true sections", that would be of great interest.

[mskoch]

@dkpst5 Can you clarify what you meant when you said "Groups currently can be used for Assign To when the assignment is group work"? 

The situation I have in mind is when an instructor wants to give each group a different topic or prompt in a group discussion or group assignment. From what I can tell, the current system allows all students, including those not assigned to a group in the linked group set, to access those group assignments or discussions. Unassigned students' submissions will not be included in the group, but they can access and submit as individuals. This is what caught some instructors off guard at the start of a semester because new students were not put in a group for discussion activities quick enough.

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly and didn't miss something already available. Thanks.

[dkpst5]

@mskoch

1. Create groups set with groups.
2. Create an assignment.
3. Check "This is a group assignment"
4. Select a group set
5. You can now find groups associated with that group set in the "assign to" (including the option to remove "everyone").

As stated, this only works for group work (which makes sense).

I've acted as students in and outside of the group to confirm only those in the associated group has it appear.

[mskoch]

@dkpst5 Thank you so much for the additional information, this is most helpful. I will test this out and put it in my "bag of tricks". 

The desire for Groups to work in Assign To for everything else that cannot be designated as group work, such as quizzes, still stand. Here's hoping Canvas will keep their ears open.

[jorgen_ivarsson]

I think you’re approaching this the wrong way if you view it as a “new” type of group. There should only be one type of group: Groups. Then, instructors should have the option to choose/activate settings for:

A: Should students be able to see each other or not?

B: Should the group have its own space or not?

C: Should students be able to sign themselves up for the group or not?

Then, integrate support for groups throughout Canvas: in assignments, quizzes, calendars, discussions file and folder permissions, etc.

[henricksen_6]

I couldn't quite figure out why I was feeling a bit uneasy with the new group proposal, but @jorgen_ivarsson captured it perfectly! Well said and I agree 100%! Don't add new group types, instead add new options for the groups we already have and better engagement with the other areas in Canvas.   

[SusanNiemeyer]

O.K. I'm going to go very BASIC here. I have explained the difference between "groups" and "sections" perhaps a hundred times here and on Facebook ("Teachers Using Canvas").

The term "Group" is confusing. Many instructors try to create "groups" for differentiated assignments, not collaborative ones. Again and again, I have explained that a "group" in Canvas functions as a "team.

Let's make Canvas terminology more intuitive.

[HeatherHarris2]

For our instance, we need group functionality for differentiation purposes that students cannot see the group enrollment or name, and it would be great if they didn't have the mini course functionality either. Due to SIS import, making sections isn't an option for us, but we need something that functions that way to easily differentiate.

[LindseySharp]

I am working with a class now that requires students to self-sign-up for multiple groups in multiple group sets. It's all very clear in the instructor view with separate tabs, but the student view is really unclear with all groups in all group sets appearing in one list without explanation about which group set it belongs to. Also, the ability to join multiple groups in the same set is often necessary and cannot be achieved. Finally, I would like to be able to easily view who is in which group and download that information in a clear way.

[breklis]

@dkpst5 Thank you for clarifying how "assign to" works with groups!

For the purposes of differentiation, "assign to" does not work with groups. Instructors need a way to differentiate due dates for groups of students without a collaborative "group assignment". Individually selecting students for a differentiated due date or assignment is not a reasonable workaround. If a teacher makes a mistake, they are at risk of violating a student's IEP. Having a private group for differentiation would help tremendously, but only if "assign to" groups is allowed for non-group assignments (and modules, pages, etc.).

As well, I'd like to chime in on using "sections" in practice and in name. The term "sections" can be confusing already. In our institution, a "section" refers to a class period. Teachers cross-list their sections for like-titled courses. Adding another layer to "sections" would be much more confusing than expanding groups, especially since so many institutions do not allow instructors to edit sections (ours included). Perhaps we could rename "groups" to "collaborative groups" or "collaborative teams" and reserve "groups" for simply grouping people.

[jon_mason]

Interesting discussion!

I just want to echo what a few people have already said about the existing terminology being confusing/unintuitive. In real life, in our institution, I think most people would intuitively think of a 'section' as referring to a chunk of content and a 'group' as referring to a (usually organisational) subset of students. If we were starting from scratch, I would definitely choose to rename Sections to Groups, but I doubt that something we'd want to change now, even if it was an option.

I definitely wouldn't be keen on having third thing with another name, as that's just going to cause more confusion, so agree with @jorgen_ivarsson.

As others have said, I think it's important to keep the separation between groups and sections. I like the idea of nested sub-sections, so you can have custom sections containing a subset of students from an existing (probably SIS-provisioned) section, and being removed from the parent section results in removal from the sub-sections. That's probably a separate discussion though!

[breklis]

One of the nice things about student "groups" is that they can either cross sections or not, depending on teacher preference. For the use case I outlined of using groups for differentiation, it would be better not to have sub-sections; that would mean teachers would have to add each section's group separately into the "assign to" area of assignments, modules, etc. To fit a broad spectrum of instructor needs, I think it would be better to lean toward greater flexibility and allow instructors to decide whether the private group (or whatever it's called) should be contained within a section or can cross all course sections.

[TrinaAltman]

@jon_mason , in our case I would not want Sections renamed to Groups as our sections are provisioned by our SIS and are called sections there. So it would be confusing to our instructors to have Sections in the LMS named Groups when they refer to SIS Sections of a course.

I like the idea of allowing instructors to create private Groups.

[azizbelkacem1]

It would be nice if the display of group sets, as it is now for teachers with tabs at the top of the page, could also be set for students.
For students, who are assigned into many groups and different group sets, the page is (lazy loading) list is displayed with many groups, making it difficult for students to see which group belongs to which group set. Inconvenient!

In addition, students can only search for groups via the Quick search field. It would be useful if students could also search by ‘Group set’.