Choose whether assignment is course, section, or group

[chrisshaw]

As a teacher creating an assignment, I want to control the kind of grouping that occurs for assignments, so I don't get confused but hidden defaults that don't work with my course.

Flow

(Proposed experience. Just a quick mock-up.)

Sections and Groups are exclusive options for the same setting. The following communicates what is happening

• If I have Sections enabled, I see the sections option
• If I have groups enabled, I see the groups option
• If I am in a different LMS that doesn't support sections, I never see the sections option

mock-select.webm.mp4

Constraints

• When sections are enabled at the app settings level, it allows Sections to be enabled without forcing assignments to use them
• This implementation only works going forward. Old assignments will break because their Sections annotations will be hidden. (We will ask support to help teachers re-enable them

Related

Depends on

• Change default LMS app install configuration in Canvas to disable Sections integration #1276
  • It doesn't really depend on Change default LMS app install configuration in Canvas to disable Sections integration #1276 , but we should solve that first to buy us some breathing room.
• Write a plan for changing sections_enabled to an assignment setting lms#3649
• Hide new sections behavior behind feature flag #1325

[chrisshaw]

Issue was linked to Harvestr Discovery: Choose whether this assignment is course, section, or group

[chrisshaw]

@seanh @marcospri What are the implications on student submissions and Speedgrader for this? Let's say we've completed #1276 so now you have grouping at the course level. Now let's say I turn on Sections in the instance.

I as a teacher then configure an assignment for the course. I go to grade. What groups do I see? Ideally, I'd see the course group selected.

Now I create an assignment for sections. I go to grade. What groups do I see? Ideally I'd flip through the students, and they'd automatically be opened in the section group.

What if I go back to an old assignment, before I enabled Sections in the instance. I go to grade. What groups do I see? Ideally, I see the course group, because that's what it was originally.

Similarly I am operating under the assumption that student groups will similarly to how they do for groups. Whatever groups were configured for the assignment are the ones I see at a student. But perhaps that's not true either? If the "default" group is now the course, and a student opens an assignment configured for sections, will the assignment be smart enough to know it needs to open in the section group?

Do we need an intermediate card dedicated to, "When I enable sections mid-semester, nothing immediately changes on me and I can keep creating groups in the "default" course group" (effectively hiding the Sections feature)?

[chrisshaw]

Some notes while talking with @seanh :

• What do we do about old assignments?

  • In general this is a one-way from course to sections, so we don't need to try to handle when it goes from sections to courses in this story. (If we decide we want to handle it, we can handle it separately)
  • We can even try to get rid of all the special sections enablement logic, which will break old assignments, but teachers could fix them by reenabling sections in the assignment.

• What would happen to current assignments?

  • Are we storing all canvas assignments? If we have them, we could simply migrate them with a sections_enabled flag
  • We might be okay, because we could just base it on the course
  • But a teacher could just fix it themselves, just like old ones

[chrisshaw]

Questions to answer next

• Is this something that only works for assignments going forward
  • Answered in the comment above. We can break these and ask teachers to re-enable them via the built-in setting.

[mkdir-washington-edu]

Slack articulation: one reason why we should have this feature: https://hypothes-is.slack.com/archives/C01B9TRVATZ/p1700233392383929

Another instance of why this is needed: https://hypothes-is.slack.com/archives/C2BLQDKHA/p1649768492905269

How we used to explain the options here back when we were mass transitioning partners from Sections to Groups: https://hypothes-is.slack.com/archives/C2BLQDKHA/p1643903043103399?thread_ts=1643899829.473049&cid=C2BLQDKHA. Note that this feature request means that we wouldn't need to transition anyone else who might be using Sections, while giving partners who have transitioned away the flexibility to return to the Sections options in courses that want it.