Configure assignment for group submission AFTER publication?

[juan_leon1]

I need to associate an assignment with a newly formed group of students.

The assignment was not originally configured for groups, and it already holds student submissions--so Canvas will not let me associate a group with the assignment now.

I suspect this is not the first time an instructor has faced such a situation.

What is the best workaround?

Thank you,

Juan

[Robbie_Grant · Accepted solution]

 @juan_leon1 ,

There is no workaround for this. Once an assignment has submissions it cannot be made into a group assignment and vice versa.  You will need to create a new assignment, make it a group assignment and assign it to the group set.

Robbie 

[juan_leon1]

OK. Thank you.

That will save me doing some fruitless trial and error.

On a related note, I noticed that I can still associate an assignment, discussion, quiz, etc. with a course section—despite that activity’s publication status.

I wonder how doing so regulates student access (in contrast to associating an activity with a group holding the same students)?

Basically, I’m exploring how to give sub-populations within a course different views of course components—and running into surprises.

I just discovered I couldn’t assign a quiz to a group, for example, but I can assign it to a course section. 

- juan

[James]

 @juan_leon1  

Groups are intended for collaboration work where students can share a common discussion, content pages, and file storage, submissions will be made for the entire group instead of each student turning in their own copy.

The mainstream view of quizzes is that you would not have one person take the quiz for the entire group, so Canvas does not support assigning quizzes to groups.

However, sections are not limited to traditional course sections. Provided you have the ability to create sections (some institutions disable that for faculty), you could create sections for "front row students", "chronically late students", "students who like blue", and "students who are in danger of failing" (although I would probably more subtle names). A student can be in more than one section.

It's sometimes difficult for people to understand Canvas' nomenclature because we all have our own experiences about what groups and sections are and we unknowingly transfer those and superimpose them on top of Canvas. If the only experience we have with a section is as a course section, then we would never think to use them in a different way.

Groups and sections are both collections of students. But their purpose is very different and many people think they want groups when they really just want some logically way of organizing students. That's the role of sections and Canvas allowed people to use sections for a long time with differentiated assignments. The addition of groups to differentiated assignments is relatively new (in the grand scheme).

Groups really are about collaboration and any assignments that are assigned to groups make the grade submission count for all students, even though you can choose to assign grades individually.

Again, some institutions lock down the ability to create sections and you may not be able to leverage their full potential.

[juan_leon1]

Extremely helpful, James! 

Fortunately, we do seem to have the liberty of creating custom class 'sections' here at our institution.

-- juan