What are reasons of combining sections of a course

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tsunghl
Community Member

I have two sections of the same course that are for different students, with different TAs and have different class schedules.  

I am not sure whether I should combine the two sections into one course space inside Canvas.  Are there reasons that multiple sections are better not to be combined?

 

 

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mzimmerman
Community Contributor

Hi,

At my school, the most common situations for merging sections are 1) when it is really the same class is crosslisted under multiple sections/departments (which results in multiple course shells in Canvas), 2) there are undergrad/grad or honors sections of the same class being taught together, 3) there a lecture class and multiple associate lab sections, or 4) the same teacher is teaching multiple sections of the same class with the same content and structure, and they don't want to have to upload/update the same content into multiple course shells.

In your situation, if the content and structure is the same and the only difference is due dates on assignments (for instance), it might make sense to combine the classes, since you can assign different due dates/availability dates to each section.   However, you will need to be sure that that TAs know which sections they are supposed to be working with.

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Ron_Bowman
Community Champion

@tsunghl @mzimmerman did a good job of providing reasons why you would combine courses.

The main reason I do it is I am the instructor for 2 sections of the same course - so I do not want to duplicate my effort for uploading information.

Grading with TA's is not really an issue as they can be limited to viewing students in their section only - plus for grading they will only see those students in their sections.

 

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I just completed teaching a course with 2 sections combined on Canvas. 

As others reported, combining 2 sections has the key benefit of maintaining only one course space, as opposed to two.  I also used Gradescope application to grade HW/exams and the link between Gradescope and Canvas gradebook worked nicely.  Overall, my experience was positive and I would recommend others to do the same.  

If anything, I wish Canvas had the function for an instructor to adopt different grading schemes between the two sections.  This would be useful for curving the final grades when two sections have different performance distributions for some reasons.  

 

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