Assigning Assignments to groups of students

[LRWC]

I am a technology specialist trying to support a teacher. The teacher has some students taking a class (Macroeconomics) that has some similar/ same content as a class they previously took with him (micro). He wants to assign returning students in the class different assignments than the rest of the class, but does not want to type everyone's individual names into Canvas. Ideally, he would be able to assign the assignment to "returners" or "new students" even though all students are in the same section/course.  

Creating groups was not the right solution because then you have to make it a "group assignment" in order to assign it to the group of returners. Once something is a group assignment, only one submission is allowed even if you are giving individual grades. 

Can anyone share any solutions? 

[chriscas]

Hi @LRWC,

The way to do this would be to create a new section in the course and enroll the students into that section.  Now with that being said, there are a ton of caveats and reasons this may not work.  Many schools/institutions sync with a SIS, and section creation is controlled by that sync and isn't a permission that is given to faculty or even admins.  If you do have the ability to create a section and enroll the students in in, I would still advise to check with your local Canvas admin team (usually in IT / eLearning / Digital Education areas) to ensure the extra section will not mess up any processes like the SIS sync, grade sync, course evaluations, etc...

I hope this information is helpful and can guide you towards a potential solution.

-Chris

[SusanNiemeyer]

@chriscas  We just had this conversation a week ago.

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Group-Set/m-p/549440#M182621

Here, we have a technology specialist who has gotten lost down the proverbial "garden path" creating a "group" assignment when he or she really needed to create "sections."  Obviously, the terminology is confusing to Canvas users at both the novice and advanced levels.

The best solution, in my opinion, is using these two terms that we discussed earlier:

"collaborative group"

"differentiated subsection"

You and I have both just been recognized as "community superstars" by Infrastructure (Yay!) - Now how can we use that recognition to bring attention to areas that could be improved?

[chriscas]

@SusanNiemeyer,

When the idea section opens again, I think this is a good one to try to bring back to the forefront.  As a developer myself (but not at the level of Canvas), I know that while the idea itself is relatively simple, it would require quite a bit of coding to a lot of different areas to make it happen.  Therefore, I'm not overly optimistic that we'd see anything happen in the short term, but this issue comes up so often that I feel like it does need to get addressed.  At the same time, I'm hoping they'd address the ability to exclude students from assignments from the assignment page (as part of the assign-to area, have an "exclude-from" that would accept individual names, sections, and whatever we come up with for this subsection thing).

-Chris