[Groups] Select specific sections when creating groups

[KimberlyHopkins]

The new(ish) option to require students to be in the same section when assigning group members is great! However, there is one more feature that would make this incredibly useful (especially in large courses): selecting which sections to  use during this process.

At our institution, we often have large courses which contain both the lecture and lab or recitation sections. It is ideal for an instructor to maintain one course, but often groups and other activities need to be restricted to specific lab sections. As all students share a lecture section, the current feature will not allow for the generation of lab specific groups.

Allowing instructors to say "out of these groups, make sure they share sections" or (possibly a little more clean), "ignore these section enrollments" would be extremely helpful. Group setup is not always a one time thing, and an instructor may even want to create a group set exclusively out of one lab section, for instance to randomly assign lab partners.

The size of these courses really makes manually assigning these groups a burden for instructors, and that also removes the ability to assign them randomly.

Ideally, instructors would be able to choose as many or as few of the sections as they want to build the group set with, and then also specify whether students must share a section to be in the same group within that set.

[audra_agnelly]

Voted! I was contacted by a teacher recently who has sections of different sizes. She had 3 sections and wanted to create 6 groups in each section, so ideally one section may have 6 groups of 3 students while another section would have 6 groups of 4 sections, so she asked Canvas to create 18 groups. The algorithm only looks at the total number of students and distributes them as equally as possible into 18 groups rather than distributing the 18 groups equally among the 3 sections and then further distributing the students from there. So instead of 6 groups per section, one section had 7, another 6 and another 5. If this feature existed she would've been able to isolate a section and specify the number of groups she wanted.

[stelpstra]

Hi  @ole-ivar_birkel ‌, you wrote your feature idea only a few months ago looking at the date you posted your reply, but it is already in Cold Storage which I don't have access to. Any idea what the reason was for that?

Maybe this could (partially) help do what you need: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-16249-create-course-groups-from-sections-using-excel 

[Stef_retired]

 @stelpstra ‌, the idea was archived within days of its submission for two reasons: (1) as written, it encompassed numerous separate requests, many of which were already open for voting; and (2) the author agreed that the idea under which we're now commenting exactly reflected one of the desired enhancements.

Anyone who wishes to read the ideas that have been moved to Cold Storage‌ can request membership in the group.

[nora_maclaren]

Voted! I want to be able to choose which sections are used to make groups.

Our SIS import creates a section to which all the students belong. This means that, when creating groups based on sections, there will always be at least one group with a mix of students (say online and on-campus students).

In another case, I might use sections to divide students by which campus they use and which major they are taking. One group assignment might require the students to live in the same city but another group assignment would be most relevant based on the student's major.

[e_j_m_vanwinger]

I encountered exactly the same problem today: shared sections for all students make a mess out of lab-groups, even though child-sections that are more restrictive exist. Indeed, being able to select the level of section, or requiring to be in ALL sections together (what happens when student are NOT in a section? Would the system be able to handle the requirement to be NOT together in a different group/section as well? - for making two non-overlapping group assignments)

[katevideogeek]

Yes I would like the option as per marja van harli's suggestion to choose the specific section to base the group set on. In Higher Ed settings students are often enrolled in more than one section, as sections may be equivalent to timetabling attendance to lectures/labs/workshops/seminars etc for a course. e.g. all students in the course enrolled in a single 'lecture' section, then subsets of students for differing 'tutorial' and 'lab' sections for smaller class ratios. There is no way to tell which sections may be associated with which group sets. 

For example: Student 1 may be enrolled in lecture, tutorial 1 and lab 3. Student 2 may be enrolled in lecture, tutorial 2 and lab 3. In this instance, if i want my groups based on tutorials, I want student 1 and student 2 to be in different groups, however if i wanted groups based on labs, I would want those two students to be in the same group. I may want to create group sets for tutes and labs, or just for tutes.  I have no way of knowing what section Canvas is basing the group allocation on when it creates the group. 

The benefit of using the require group members to be in the same section checkbox feature instead of other methods is that a) you can create smaller section-related group discussions (e.g. tutorial activities) through a more efficient and cleaner group set process (rather than create a billion individual discussion forums released to each section - time consuming and overwhelming/confusing in your view as an instructor); b) if a student changes their timetabling enrolment in the section, the group set will recognise this and update based on that change. This is where tying group set creation to specific sections would also be beneficial, as ideally the student would be re-enrolled into a new group based on their section enrolment change and not stranded in some kind of unallocated nether world that then requires manual intervention. 

[rebecca_denham]

Any news on this much needed feature? In our setup, all students belong to the whole course section, so the tick box achieves nothing for us.

[LowellWade]

I am the Lead TA for CIVL 210 were we allowed students to self-select laboratory groups of three group members with the requirement the three group members had to be registered in the same laboratory section.

What we noticed, students were able to self-select lab groups, of up to three group members (this feature worked OK), and even though the requirement all three group members had to be registered in the same laboratory section, Canvas interpreted this requirement as the students being in the same lecture section. This meant I had to manually shuffle a number of students around and assign students to lab groups in the end.

Is it possible to have two additional options under the requirement of being in the same section check-box of: a) in the same lab section check-box or b) in the same tutorial section check-box?

I know CIVL 210 is not the only course in the Faculty of Engineering where students have to self-assign lab / project groups. As well, I am sure this feature would also be useful in the Faculty of Science as well as the Faculty of Arts where students also form self-assigned groups and project teams.

[bernhard_lohkam]

A must have. So useless without. Why have sections when you cannot use them...