Displaying unique content to individual students, groups, or sections

[usmapc]

Good evening, community: I am trying to restrict modules and module items to specific students or groups. It’s something I’ve been able to do in other LMS software and it’s been discussed here before in these threads:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/How-do-I-restrict-module-items-to-specific-...

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Restricting-Modules-to-specific-students/td...

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Is-there-a-way-to-restrict-course-content-v...

People in these forums have been thoughtful and generous with their workaround suggestions. However, as noted in these threads, aside from workarounds that appear to range from somewhat complex to very (!) complex, Instructure has not addressed this usability issue.

My questions, then, are first: has this function been added? And second, if not, can anyone recommend a third-party addon that provides this feature (and perhaps other essential features)?

Thank you, sincerely, for your help!

[greydon · Accepted solution]

Hello @usmapc 

Thank you for contacting the Canvas Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with restricting modules to particular groups or sections. Thank you for providing those links to other posts regarding similar requests and work arounds. There certainly are some decent suggestions because currently, no there isn't a way to specifically use the module itself to apply to particular groups of people. However, there is a need and want for this within the community and hoping that someday we will have a release for this. Currently, it isn't in the upcoming releases however:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Releases/tkb-p/canvas-release

Your best bet is to create modules for particular groups or sections and the assignments within that module can be assigned only to them. If assignments are assigned to a particular section, the other would not be held accountable if you were also to enable module requirements and prerequisites etc. That also could be something to consider using. Assigning particular assignments to groups or sections and using a module prerequisite to get another one opened after the fact. You could also speak with your CSM as canvas can and will customize tools and features upon request. That would need to be worked out directly with the canvas CSM however. Some of these posts also have good suggestions. We apologize for any inconvenience and please feel  free to upvote these in the idea forum or post your own.

Feel free to check out our Ideas Conversation forum as we implement great ideas such as this that we find within the community. 

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/idb-p/ideas

[usmapc]

Thank you, greydon, for your thoughtful and helpful reply; I appreciate it!

[joel_taylor]

I really liked the idea from @greydon . However, I couldn't get it to work (not until much later).

1. I created an "access" quiz and only allocated it to one person ("John").
2. Next, I created a preliminary module with only the access quiz inside.
3. After, I created a content module that had the preliminary module as the pre-requisite.

When I tested this (as test student and acting as John), I could get neither to work - both were able to access the content. Can anyone explain this issue (what is the purpose of pre-requisites if it doesn’t prevent someone accessing content)?

[See picture 1]

Since that didn’t work, I tried to add the quiz in the same module as a requirement (must complete the one specific quiz with full marks). This prevented John from accessing the revision, but not the students not allocated the quiz (everyone else).

Setup [picture 2]

John’s view [picture 3]

Everyone else’s view [picture 4]

Note, the option to re-lock modules kept coming up. However, apparently it means nothing because it was not locked. Also, for some reason, this comes up even when the page has never been viewed by any student (test or real). I know this because I created a page, then, a minute later created the module with pre-requisite and the notification still appeared.

My next idea was to create a quiz that everyone can access, but is password-locked. However, this still didn’t block anyone! I even entered into Student View and reset the student view, but they could jump the requirement like it wasn’t there.

Out of curiosity, I tried the other requirement (completion in order). This seemed to be the only option that worked because the next page was greyed out. Also, if the student found a working link to module content page (“revision”), the requirement blocked the student.

[Apparently, "Maximum number of attachments allowed is: 5" means only four attachments are allowed...]

Did anyone else experience these issues? I thought the suggestion above was genius – but I didn’t expect everything to be broken when attempting.