mkdir-washington-edu
commented
5 months ago To reiterate some of what Lee wrote above, there are potential issues with the Sections we show instructors, which we could fix, though right now schools are mostly incentivized to keep our Sections integration off since many schools use Sections for academic cross listing and don't want students divided in Hypothesis along those lines.
The schools who are using Canvas Sections as different real-life sections of a course have pointed out that in their environments instructors in one Sections shouldn't be able to see data, or get email digests, concerning another Section in the same Course. Edit, the issue of instructors seeing student work outside their own Section was fixed by Marcos months ago. The issue of getting email digests for Sections you're not a member of seems to remain.
The main issues schools have had with this feature is that it's not clear to instructors when it's on or off, and you need to have it on or off for an entire application instance. One potential solution would be to allow instructors to choose whether they're using Sections for group management per assignment, like we do with Canvas Group Sets.
- https://github.com/hypothesis/support-legacy/issues/166
- https://github.com/hypothesis/product-backlog/issues/1309
Tangential to this, we have had some (very few) requests to implement Sections for D2L. These requests largely seem to come from schools where Sections gets updated by an SIS, and instructors generally don't use Groups in the LMS because they're need to be frequently updated (e.g., credit recovery programs in schools that often have students joining and leaving the program).
Regarding sections, the current section integration might be flawed, we display all the sections to all the teachers and that might not be the right thing to do. See: https://github.com/hypothesis/private-issues/issues/65
Fixing that is pretty trivial but if we did that most questions around sections and copy/sharing might not be relevant for sections as in most cases as teachers might only see one.
In a bit of conflict with that is #1309 (and maybe also #3649 #166 #1827). The idea that teachers could, while creating an assignment, select if it's targeted to the whole course, to sections or to a group set. I say that it might be in conflict with the previous point because if a teacher is not supposed to see learners from outside their section, explicitly creating an assignment for the whole course will always achieve that. I suspect there are at least a few instances were the desire to share/copy across sections is actually the desire to disable the sections integration for one assignment and use the whole course group.
Even outside the scope of the recent PRDs I think we should clarify these and maybe do a little "sections revamp" PRD.