[Groups] Showing at least one group membership column on the People page.

[simon_rodan]

On this page "https://sjsu.instructure.com/courses/<course_id>/users" add a column (or columns) to show which group a student has been assigned to.

At the moment we have:

Name, Login ID, SIS ID, Section, Role, Last Activity, Total Activity.  

My suggestion is to append columns to the table, one for each group set, showing which group the student belongs.

An added feature would be to allow sorting of the list by any of the columns. 

[jsc]

The same view for students as for teachers, when looking at groups and group sets: One tab for each group set.

Thats how you see it as a teacher, but right now the students are in stead looking at a very long list of all groups in all group sets. It makes an overview impossible, if you during a course have 10 different group sets each with 10 groups.

Thank you,

Jeppe

[30639324]

Yes that would be very helpful indeed! I have an instructor who shared this exact same feedback.

https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/harvard?sr=search&searchId=c5f306c9-6140-4dbd-8a41-bb058a6f4f...‌

[u0061533]

Oh yes. The current form is unworkable. I have a class of 300 and this semester I tried a few partner assignments and pre-made sets of 150 groups for them to add themselves into. There were a lot of problems with this so I started to investigate and realized the student view took minutes to page through the long list of groups - all in alphabetical order. So they had to slowly page through A1-1 through A1-150 (10 at a time) to get to A2-1 through A1-150 and it was just ridiculous. This caused me all sorts of effort on my end to clean-up this disaster.

[RobDitto]

 @u0061533 , great comment, and thanks very much for voting this idea.

Slow loading of the student view of groups is considered a bug in Canvas, so please also feel free to report it as an issue to your institution's Canvas administrators (or directly if you're an admin), referencing issue CNVS-19640.

[RobDitto]

The slow-groups-loading issue, moved to a different tracker (COMMS-1118), was fixed along with the 2018-06-23 release. This should make the current design of groups for students much more supportable. 

(With that said, I'd still like to see an easier design for students who need to sign up for self-signup groups across several categories/sets in a course. Tabs would be one way to do that, provided a student can easily discover which categories/sets still need self-signup.)

[christophe_bree]

Why is the view for teachers different than the view for students? Keeping the tabs would make it so much more user friendly for the students. I guess the programmers at Canvas never use Canvas themselves 🙂 ?

[amcknight]

YES -- I do many group assignments over the course of the semester, so by the end, the students "groups" page is just complete chaos, and substantial numbers of them fail to sign up for a group entirely, earning an undeserved 0, or worse, accidentally change their group for a completely different assignment and assume they are good to go (also resulting in an undeserved 0). It is hugely problematic and a giant PITA for me to sort out. If they had tabs like I do, signing up for groups would not be nearly as confusing for them.

[webbw]

Yes, this is a major problem for students.  I cannot understand why it is set up the way it currently is.  It makes no sense.  For several quarters I couldn't figure out why students had such difficulty finding the groups they were in for different projects, but having had a student show me their view on the Groups page, I now get it.  This is a HUGE flaw in Canvas and needs to be corrected.

[RobDitto]

Very helpful comments,  @christophe_bree , amcknight and  @webbw . Charitably, I believe the Product team's intention at the time was to get links to groups all on one page for students. However, they might not have given sufficient weight to the case where several self sign-up group sets exist in a course.

To mitigate this, I recommend that teachers, whenever possible, turn off "Allow self sign-up" after students are done forming groups. That not only reduces the length of the groups page for students but also prevents students from switching -- which can complicate grading.

Of course, it will be better when Canvas improves the design of students' view of groups in a course! Still, for now, I wanted to offer the suggestion in the paragraph above.

[petersg]

Thanks Jeppe and David for your description of the problems - I also face these with my courses.  Rob and David, I don't know how slow it was before June 2018 but its still annoyingly slow for students who see maybe 10 assignment groups, scroll down, wait for another 10 to load, scroll some more... extremely tedious if there are several hundred in total.  All the more reason to break it up like the teacher view does...