Can we create different sections on Discussions?

[JanetWang]

I have 3 sections of AP classes.  When I use Discussions on Canvas, I would like to separate the postings from 3 different classes.  But it looks like I see all the postings together.  Is there anything I can do as to the settings so that I can see the postings for different sections separately?  Thank you! 

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

@JanetWang ...

You could create discussion groups, and then you could assign people to those groups that are identical to the sections that they are enrolled in.  This way, you can have one discussion topic but separated out into three groups.

1. Create a Group Set within your course.  You could name this the same name as your discussion topic title.  How do I add a group set in a course?
2. Create groups within the group set.  You could come up with creative names for these three sections...such as "Lions", "Tigers", and "Bears" (oh my!).  How do I manually create groups in a group set?
3. Add the students from these three sections into each of your groups.  How do I manually assign students to groups?
4. Go to your Discussion topic in your course.  Follow the instructions in this Guide: How do I create a group discussion in a course?  As you are following these instructions, you will be choosing the Group Set name that you created in Step #1 (not the group names you created in Step #2).

Once you save your changes, Canvas automagically knows that when students go to this topic, they will only be having conversations with other members of the same group.  They will not see conversations of the other two groups.

If you wanted to repeat this process for another discussion topic, you could certainly do so.  And, if you wanted to change things up with yet another discussion topic, you could create yet another Group Set with completely different group names (Team Red, Team Blue, Team Green....for example), and mix up the students so that you have some students from all three sections in each of the three groups you wanted.  Of course, you could have more than three groups for any given Group Set, but this is just an example.

Hope this will be of some help to you!  Sing out if you have any other questions about this...thanks!

[JanetWang]

Thank you so much @Chris_Hofer .  It definitely helped.  I will create my new discussion sections.

[SusanNiemeyer]

@JanetWang 

So that everything is clear, you will be creating Discussion "Groups" (not "sections"). In Canvas, a "group" is like a "team." Groups are used for collaborative work.

"Sections" are used to differentiate students. You can't set up Discussion "Sections."

[JanetWang]

Thank you for the clarification.  I will create the groups now.

[miller4]

It took me a while to figure out how to toggle between the discussions for the two groups I set up for my two sections. I found a little icon --a drawing of two heads -- at the top left of my discussion page.  Clicking that let me choose which group's discussion I wanted to see.

[DMSVCTE]

I came from another thread where apparently it used to be possible to assign a discussion to a specific section. I get the groups solution, but what if I have students who are doing something else and are not part of the discussion. They're not in a group (essentially they are in a group of one) but they would still see the discussion, right?

[James]

@DMSVCTE 

You need to be really careful. I haven't checked recently as I don't use Canvas groups anymore (too much overhead for me but create multiple discussions and assign individuals to each discussion).

I think this is what happened: Students not assigned to a group post in the main thread and would be able to see each others discussion posts. Rather than being a group of one, they would be a group of everyone not in a group. The people in groups wouldn't see their posts and they wouldn't see the posts of people in groups.

What I know happened is that if you added someone to a group after they had initially posted without being in a group, then their posts did not move to the group and when you went into SpeedGrader, you did not see their posts  made when they weren't in a group.

Don't use groups as a hack for what you're wanting to do! It's rarely the right thing to do and there area lots of unintended consequences and unforeseen issues.