Filter Gradebook by Groups

[kas200]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

This is reviving quite a few suggestions, including Grades - Filter or Sort Students by Groups, Add "Groups" filtering feature to Assignments/Grading, and Gradebook Smart View by Group.

We need a way to filter the gradebook using student groups. Right now, the gradebook can only be filtered by sections within a course. There are quite a few use cases for requesting this functionality:

1. We have several large classes where the TAs are responsible for grading a subsection of a section within a course. This becomes tedious, because the filtering options for the gradebook limit this by section only. So if they have a section of 40 students but are only responsible for grading 20 of those, they need to create a section to filter the gradebook. This becomes troublesome when there are 400+ students in the course since creating sections requires the manual work of clicking on each student to change their associated sections. Even with section-anonymity turned on, this is still 60+ clicks for one subsection of 20 students.

2. We have several programs that use outside folks as facilitators who grade/interact with students. We set-up student groups for these folks so they can communicate with just their group of students. It would be nice to filter the gradebook of these groups instead of writing the facilitator's name in the Notes column or manually creating sections for the groups.

3. Some of our courses have several different groups in them for various purposes (different projects, in-class groups, etc). In general, it would be nice if instructors could filter off these groups to compare student performance and involvement.

As a final note, the drag-and-drop functionality of Groups is much easier to use than the manual process of creating sections. While manageable for small numbers, it's simply too much to handle for large courses.

This idea has been added to our product plan for Q2 2019 and will influence development within Canvas. Follow this idea to receive updates as they are available.

 :smileyinfo: Adding this idea to our product plan means we will be working on it, but it does not guarantee that it will be developed exactly as defined by the idea, or that it will be added to the production environment.

Read more about the feature idea process:

• Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes
• How does the feature idea process work in the Canvas Community?
• What is the feature development process for Canvas?

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Release Notes (2019-06-22)‌ & https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-17625 

[g_r_saward]

Thanks Gerald – this is very interesting and useful feedback

[laurakgibbs]

It's the mystery of the disappearing word "" (on-line) ... does anybody know why that word falls out of Jive posts?

Since I use that word often, it's a problem, ha ha.

because it is fully . 

SHOULD read:

because it is fully on-line

I started noticing this maybe a week ago but who knows how long it has been doing on. DEEPLY WEIRD. 🙂

[Renee_Carney]

We're still working with Lithium Support on the mysterious dropping of 'on-line'.  No answers yet.  We have them stumped.

[laurakgibbs]

It is so weird! I wonder how many incoherent sentences I have accidentally written that lost their "on-line" ha ha.

.

I'm trying all-caps to see if that matters. 🙂

[laurakgibbs]

Nope. All-caps ON-LINE also disappeared. Wow!

[barish_golland]

Our university needs groups filtering in the gradebook. A lot of instructors ask for this at the Business School since they do a lot of group work.

[maguire]

I have found that a very good way of doing this is to use sections, thus I put into sections each of the students that a given instructor has to interact with. This makes it easy for an instructor to have an overview of the students' progress (for those students that they are concerned with) via the "view by section" feature of the grade book. I also inject a custom column into the gradebook to indicate the group numbers/names, so that it is easy for the instructor to see those students who are working together in a project in the gradebook. (Simply choose the group number/name column and type "s" - to sort the student by group number/name - for example, for one course I have "Y group x" where Y is the name of an instructor and x is 1 .. N (where N is the highest numbered group for the specific instructor) or another course with one instructor where the groups are simply numbers from 1..77). This seems to work well in courses with nearly 600 students and 50+ instructors.

[oldroyda]

This is a really interesting work-around. I've tried to figure out how to do it in my course but maybe I don't have the capabilities. Would you be able to make me a screencast and show me how this is done? It is possible that I could pass this onto my course designer.

[maguire]

Making sections and viewing them:

• You can create the sections (if you have the role Teacher) using the Settings menu, choose the tab "Sections". You use the +Section button to add a new section.
• One can add a list of persons to a section - via the People page +People button
• You can view the sections by going to the gradebook - then the first time you do this you choose "View" then "Filters" then click on "Sections". Now any time you want you can choose the section from the pull down that will now be just to the left of the search box (in the right corner of the gradebook screen).

You need to use a program to inject the custom columns, see Adding a custom column to gradebook: Chip sandbox  The custom column is simply a text box that can hold up to 255 characters. A nice feature (as I noted in my earlier message) is that you can select this column in the gradebook and type "s" and sort based on this column.

If you or your course designer have problems with the above, contact me and I can send the code.

[mollym_ogrady]

I think organizing groups in the grade book would be beneficial for so many reasons. First, assignments for those students would only show up in their section, not everyone. I've had issues in the past assigning quizzes that I only wanted certain students to take and other students would either take the quiz or ask why there is a dashed line in their grade book for it. Also, I could create differentiated quizzes that only certain students could see. I have a large EC and ESL population that need modified quizzes and assignments. Separate grade book groups would help organize this for and my students. It would also help to be able to add students outside of your assigned homeroom. For example, I teach inclusion math and have students from other teachers join my class. I give them grades but always have to hand write them and give them to their homeroom teacher to put into the grade book. It makes sense to just be able to add them to my Canvas course and be able to assign and provide feedback to them too.