From the brain of our very own Brendan Lalor we are pleased to share this handy Canvas tech tip!
Ever teach two non-diverging sections of the same course? If so, there can be a lot of needless duplication (everything you add/subtract/announce in one Canvas course has to be manually replicated in the other). But did you know, Canvas has a feature that allows the combination of two sections into one course?!
You can read more about it here in the Canvas documentation.
This feature allows the sections to remain distinguished as meta-groups that can be treated as one or receive different announcements, deadlines, be broken into groups like a normal class, etc. It even works for automatically created groups (Canvas offers to keep “sections” separate). Benefits include:
- Announcements can go to one, the other, or both sections.
- Even automatically generating groups, it’s possible to ensure that all group members are from the same section.
I don’t know exactly how to do the benefit-math; but if you multiply this improvement by the number of faculty in this situation who could benefit from it, I’m pretty sure we’d all come out ahead. This is a great fatigue-reducing feature for anyone who puts a lot of work into their Canvas sites and teaches more than one section of the same course.
