During the Fall 2020 semester, many faculty are breaking their students into smaller groups and rotating when those groups come to class. Canvas has two tools to make communication and course organization easier with this setup: sections and groups. Primarily,
groups are for collaboration and sections are for differentiation.Note: If you are an instructor with unused Lab sections, for efficiency consider cross-listing these sections instead of creating manual sections.
Manually Created Sections
Faculty can create manual sections to further organize students in their courses. Two key benefits of using sections are:
- Faculty can filter data in New Analytics to see section data.
- Faculty can limit student interaction to only other students in the same section.
- Faculty can assign sections different due dates for quizzes.
To use manual sections, faculty should add new sections to their course and
not remove students from their original course section. The original section syncs with My.Butler and should reflect the My.Butler enrollment.
Learn how to
manually create a section and
add students to each section.
Groups
Groups are another way to organize students in a course. Benefits of groups include:
- Faculty can allow student choice in group sign-ups.
- Faculty can quickly create random groups using the automatic group feature.
- Each group has a private group space in Canvas that includes announcements, pages, and discussions.
Learn how to create groups.
Sections vs. Groups Comparison
