Setting up Differentiated Assignments

Setting up Custom Sections

Setting up Differentiated Assignments

When setting up an assignment, instructors can indicate whether an assignment should be assigned for everyone in the course, for specific sections, student groups or for individual students.

Only the section(s), student group(s) or student(s) that are specified in the assignment details will be able to view the assignment.

1. Click Assignments

2. Click the Add Assignment button

3.     Enter the Assignment details for the assignment:

• the name
• description
• number of points

4.     Click the x beside everyone so you are able to enter a specific section or student

You will see a list of sections and students to choose from.

5. Choose a section or student. You can also type the name of the section as Canvas doesn’t show a complete list of sections. You can choose more than 1 section or student.

6.     Enter the availability dates for the assignment

7.     Click Add if you would like to add another section or student to the assignment with a different due date.

You will be able to add the section or student:

8. Click Save to save the assignment or Save and Publish to publish the assignment

You will see a warning message indicating you didn’t choose to direct your assignment to the whole class.

6.     Click Continue to go ahead and Save or Save and Publish the assignment.

In the gradebook, grade cells are greyed out for students who have not been included in the assignment. In the following assignment, only C Deep is assigned to the assignment:

Setting up Custom Sections in Your Course

Sections in a credit course are automatically synchronized with the corresponding class rosters in goSFU. Sometimes, particularly in larger online courses that lack tutorial sections, instructors may still wish to divide a class into smaller groups. This can usually be achieved by creating a Group Set (also known as student groups) on the course's People page.

In the case that students groups are not sufficient, as a last resort, we can add custom sections to the Canvas course. While these custom sections enable more advanced usage, such as differentiated assignments, the sections will not automatically sync. This means the instructor will have to add and remove students who add or drop the course who are in those sections. 

One use case would be to assign a differentiated assignment to a subset of students, and to assign TAs to be responsible for subsections of a course that don't have goSFU tutorial/lab sections.

Pros:

• To take advantage of features only available to course sections and not student groups (e.g. the use cases above)

Cons:

• Not an officially supported configuration (should be considered last-resort)
• Requires custom setup by CEE/IT support
• Instructors will need to manage enrollments changes (adds/drops) manually

If you prefer to create groups rather than have custom sections created, please review the documentation on creating student groups

Please contact ceehelp@sfu.ca if you need custom sections for your course.