Q. What is the difference between 'Sections' and 'Groups?

A. In short:

Sections are subsections of students within a Canvas course, who may be taught by different lecturers or tutors. The intention is for each tutor to assign specific activities to their own subsection, e.g. different announcements, calendar dates (and times), discussions, assignments or quizzes.
Groups (which must be created within Group Sets or 'categories'), enable you to provide group-specific mini-Canvas areas for students to collaborate on group work or team work. Each group gets their own 'group homepage' (which the tutor may visit), in which they have full control of tools such as Pages, Files and Discussions, to work on tasks together.

Please refer to our detailed guidance pages:

Q. Can I create groups within sections?

A. Assume that you have created sections of students to be taught by different tutors, e.g. Section A (for Tutor A), Section B (for Tutor B), Section C (for Tutor C). The tutors may want their subsection of students to do some group work among themselves. Then you would create, say, a Group Set called 'Tutorial groups' and within that, create groups 'Group A with Tutor A', 'Group B with Tutor B', 'Group C with Tutor C' and allocate the students correspondingly. The students within each group could collaborate on teamwork, under the supervision of their respective tutors. Thereafter, the Discussions tool could be used for groups to share their outputs with the rest of the class.