How can students know which section they are in, without using the People tab?

[ErnestoFe]

Students are asking which Section they are in, but nowhere on my homepage is that information found. We do not use the People tab and prefer to use the Participants Profile tab by Peerconnect. Thus I wanted to know if a student's section could be a tab shown on their homepage. 

[Ron_Bowman · Accepted solution]

@ErnestoFe -

As far as I know the only indication is from the people tab.  However, a work around would be to make an assignment group called Section and then put an assignment in it called Section with 0 points and do not count towards grade.   You would Then just assign their section to the grade.

Interestingly enough you can create a grading scheme for an individual assignment, so for the assignment choose letter grade and then create a grading scheme called section with entries like the following:

 For that assignment, chose the grading scheme Section and then for their grade you can type in section 1, section 2 or section 3 - Of course this means that the instructor has to do all that work, but a simple download of the csv to excel and copy paste and you are done - you will have the students actual section in the download, so easy enough to set up and do

Then in their grade book they will see their section for the grade as 0 (section 1) , 0 (section 2), 0 (section 3) I am not sure why I can't put in the numeric grade of 85 and have it populate to section 2 - I just get 85 and the student sees 85.  The 0 shows up for all sections entered below is a student view.

 

[Zander254]

---

@MI Bridges wrote:

Students are asking which Section they are in, but nowhere on my homepage is that information found. We do not use the People tab and prefer to use the Participants Profile tab by Peerconnect. Thus I wanted to know if a student's section could be a tab shown on their homepage. 

---

They may be blocking it due to FERPA concerns. There are questions about students seeing other students who are not in their section. If you group sections or cross-list sections it can cause a FERPA issue. I was looking for the previous discussion on that but don't see it.

[Ron_Bowman]

@ErnestoFe 

I probably should have asked about the sections.  I assumed a crosslisted course of multiple sections.  However, I guess you could have had one course and broke the students up into sections within that large class.  In either case, The method I described would work for providing a place where students could find out their section (not as ideal as on the course home page - or possibly on the dashboard card).

The one thing I really do not like about cross-listed sections is the loss of the actual course section of the cross-listed class

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Great question @ErnestoFe. In addition to the People page, students can view which section they're in by beginning a Conversations message. The message requires that the user select a course, then a section, then the recipient(s). I noticed that if a student's section enrollment has the "Can interact with users in their section only" checkbox selected, they can only view classmates in the same section on the People page and in the new Conversations address field.

[jboehly]

If the course section is included in the course title, the student could view that information by going to the Canvas Dashboard under the "Card View."

How do I view my favorite courses in the Card View Dashboard as a student? 

[Ron_Bowman]

@jboehly -

True, but with a cross listed course of section 2 into section 1, a student in section 2 sees section 1 not section 2.  Of course they could nickname the course themselves, but if I crosslist the course before publishing it, then they can get confused by seeing section 1 when they know they registered for section2.  Of course my fix is to make the home page have as the first 2 lines (or however many to handle all the sections) an explanation of what the students see in regards to their section.