Examples of how Groups and Sections can be used

Sections are generally used as an administrative tool by instructors to sort students. Sections do not have any impact on the student user experience of Canvas; most students do not actually know that they are part of a Canvas Section.

Sections are often used for assessment tasks. For example, within a subject, different cohorts of students (e.g. students from different tutorials) may have to complete different assessment tasks (or the same assignment tasks under different conditions). This can be achieved through Sections.

When creating assessment tasks, instructors have the option to assign these to specific Sections (indicated in red in the image below).

If instructors wish to assignm the same assessment task to different Sections, but with a different deadline, they can use the +Add button (see below).

Even if the same assessment task is assigned to every student enrolled in the subject, Sections can still be useful when marking assessment tasks. Speedgrader, the default marking interface in Canvas, allows instructors to sort students by Section. In practice, provided Sections have been created for tutorials, this would mean that tutors could quickly filter students to show only those within their own tutorial.

Studios represent an important mode of learning within our Faculty. Because individual studios usually operate semi-independently within a subject, studio Canvas sites typically need to be structured differently to the conventional tutorial structure.. This can be achieved using Groups. A Group is a subset of a Canvas subject that can have its own Pages, Files and Discussions, all of which are inaccessible to anyone outside that Group.

Often, individual studios leaders run exercises and provide resources that would not be relevant to other studios within the same subject. In postgraduate subjects, where studios are run almost entirely independently, privacy and confidentiality can be an issue if, for example, external consultants agree to provide sensitive documents under the condition they be made available only to a specific studio.

For example, within the Master of Architecture Studio CDE, individual studios have their own studio leader, own brief, own site, own exercises, own timetable etc. A separate Group can be created for each of these studios, and within the Group, studio leaders would have the ability to run their studio independently without interference from other studios.

Individual studio Groups would still fall within the overall Canvas subject structure, meaning subject coordinators would still be able to post general announcements, share files and resources, and create assessment tasks that could be accessible to all students enrolled in the subject, regardless of Group/studio allocation.

As outlined on this page, Sections and Groups perform mostly different tasks. As such, Groups and Sections can be used concurrently.

For example, studios can be clustered in Groups so that each individual studio have their own online space within which to operate. Because all assessment tasksare created at the subject level, in order for tasks to be available only to students in specific studios, studios also need to be organised into Sections.

In this example, the enrolment lists for the Groups and Sections would be identical and match the studio allocations. However, there are instances when enrolments of Groups and Sections should not match. For example, whereas Groups tend to to match studio allocations, Sections can be created for regular submissions versus extended submissions, for different studio levels, for different studio types etc.

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