[ARCHIVED] Group Enrollments Not Matching Course Enrollments

[hvaughn]

Is this a problem for anyone else?  Groups created from an enrollment within a course should always reflect that course's enrollment. It is a pain for instructors to have to manually remove students from course project groups, especially if it a large class.

Scenario: Earlier in the semester, an instructor created a group set for an assignment and added five groups. Students were dispersed among those groups at that time. Since that time several students have withdrawn from the course. These students have remained as group members, even though they have been withdrawn from the course. Shouldn't a group's membership created from the enrollment in a course, reflect the current status of the enrollment? If a student withdraws from a course, the student should also be removed from the group, at least that makes sense to me. So I contacted Canvas support.

Canvas Support's Response: "When a group is created within a course it also creates an entirely separate page or group area for these students within the groups. This area has its own set of people for the course, its own “enrollments” if you will. When they withdraw from the course their enrollment in the course is removed, but the status in the group is retained. You can go under the page for the group and remove the student from the people page if they should no longer appear there. But in short, group pages are kind of like a course in that they have their own set of enrollments and access levels. Users will need to removed from group pages."

My opinion:  Groups created from an enrollment within a course should always reflect that enrollment. It is a pain for instructors to have to manually remove students from course project groups, especially if it a large class. And we have a policy that once a student is withdrawn, they should no longer have access to any future course assignments, materials, etc. If the student remains in the group and new content is added to the group space for new assignments, then they would have access to materials after they have withdrawn from a course. This is an issue for us. We have several courses that create group spaces to work on projects for the duration of the semester.

Any one else have a thought on this?

A feature idea   is now open for voting!

[kona]

 @hvaughn ​, honestly I didn't realize that students retained their group access and that it was like a different course. Hmmm... no, that doesn't sound right to me either. I did a quick check and didn't see anything in Canvas Feature Ideas​ that seemed related to this, so you might consider creating an idea - How to write a good feature idea submission​. I'd definitely vote for it!

PS Because there isn't a right or wrong answer for this, I went ahead and switched it over to a discussion instead of a question.

[hvaughn]

Thanks for your response, Kona.  We were very surprised to find this out yesterday. I found a feature idea about groups and late enrollments to a course, but maybe this needs to be separated?

[hvaughn]

Heck, since the feature idea referenced is a bit different, I just went and created a separate feature idea

[kona]

I agree that this seems to be a different issue and warranted a new feature idea.

[hvaughn]

Hi all,

The feature idea is now open for voting!  Please go to the idea and vote up! 

Thanks,

Holly

[kona]

Voted! Thanks for the reminder!