[Assignments] "Assign to" at Assignment Group level

[bsr]

Problem statement:

Problem: Currently, assignments have to be assigned to student sets (e.g., everyone, section, groups, etc.) individually. When a course is imported from the previous year into the current year's shell, all of those settings are lost, and each individual assignment must be re-edited to assign it to the appropriate sections. This is tedious and extremely time-consuming. Case use: I have a shell that combines two versions of a course, one with a lab and one online-only with no lab. I combine them so that the online students can participate in discussion assignments with the lab course students. However, all of the lab assignments need to be assigned only to the lab course students. There are 12 lab exercises, 12 lab quizzes, 4 project check-ins, a lab report, a lab exam, and two peer-evaluations that all have to be assigned only to those in the lab version, and every year, the assignments lose those settings when imported from the previous shell, necessitating over 30 adjustments (open assignment, scroll down, enter prompt, select course, save, return, scroll back down, repeat...). Moreover, all courses and sections don't populate in the "assign to" drop-down menu, even after selecting the same one over and over, so I have to type in the course number in the "assign to" window every single time. An option to assign an entire assignment group to a course or section would save a tremendous amount of time, and greatly reduce errors!

Proposed solution:

Include an "assign to" function within the assignment group editing options, allowing all assignments within the group to be simultaneously assigned to a specified group with a single user action. Why: 1. Would save a lot of time and work in course set-up. 2. Would reduce errors in course set-up (it is easy to miss a few assignments when going through a very long list, especially since there is no "next" option, and no way to return to the same point in the page after editing an assignment). 3. Would reduce errors in later adjustments (if instructors or TAs add make-up or bonus assignments during the semester, a categorical section assignment would keep the additions from inadvertently messing up the other sections' grades; we have this problem a lot with TAs who don't think to change the "assign to" when adding something to a category, and being in a hurricane-prone state, we ALWAYS have make-ups and adjustments during the semester).

User role(s):

instructor

[bsr]

Just adding on to my "why": in addition to the >30 assignments that I need to assign only to students in one version of the course (plus another half dozen that need to be assigned only to the other version), my institution decided to split my in-person lab course into two different sections: students who are stationed at off-campus locations are now placed in a different section, even though they commute to the main campus for this class. It turns out that assigning by the course number doesn't work, and so for each of those >30 assignments, I have to assign two separate sections, further increasing the tedium factor. An option to assign everything within an assignment group to one slice or another of the class would really help to buffer the "dissecting from above" problem, too!