A Section is a partition of students within a Canvas course.

Sections partition students in a course so that tutors may provide different assignments (and/or due dates), calendar dates, discussions, quizzes or announcements for students in different sections.
Sections can also be created for students who may need extra time in a course.

Notes:

Sections cannot be used to direct different content (files or pages) to different students. Use the Groups function in order to do that. Groups are like 'mini-Canvas' areas where students can create pages, upload files and participate in discussions with their fellow group members.
Announcements will be sent to all those with the teacher role, even if you have allocated the announcement to a particular section. Teachers would have to manage these notifications via their course-level Notification Preferences, if they wish to avoid receiving them. Alternatively, use the Inbox tool (instead of Annoucements) and create a message to go to students only.

1. An introduction to Sections

Canvas Sections are used for managing marking when there are multiple instructors, and for general administrative purposes, such as to assign different due dates to certain sections of students.

Once Sections have been created, you can:

Provide different assignments, quizzes, discussions and announcements per section
Vary due dates for assignments
Vary dates (and times) of calendar events
Filter the Gradebook
Filter the SpeedGrader™ by Section when grading student work.
View Section allocations for students on the People page.

2. Managing Sections

At Oxford we have developed some custom functionality that allows teachers and course administrators to quickly create new sections and add students to sections. This page describes how to use that functionality. You can still use the standard Canvas method of creating sections and adding users. For information about that method, please see the Canvas guide: How do I add a section to a course?

To access the Oxford tool for managing sections, go to the Settings page for the course via the left-hand Course Navigation menu and then click the Manage Sections link in the right hand menu:

Screenshot of the menu within Settings for a course with the Manage Courses link highlighted.

The first time you access this tool you will be asked to grant permissions. You should only need to do this the first time you use the tool.

When the tool loads, you will see the option at the top of the page to add a new section. Simply enter the name of the section you would like to create and click the "+ Section" button.

Once you have created the necessary sections, you can add users to them by dragging and dropping from the list of users in the left hand column to the appropriate section in the right hand column.

Animated image showing drag and drop method for adding users to sections.

Once the user has been dropped into the appropriate section a circular loading animation will briefly appear while the system updates. The section is now updated - there is no need to make any further confirmation. Repeat this drag and drop process for each student that you would like to add to a section. You can scroll through the alphabetical list to find users or alternatively you can search by name or SSO by entering at least 3 characters in the Filter by User Search field above the list of users. This search filter will search for users primarily by their name and SSO but also by any secondary email address they may have added to their account (e.g. gmail).

Alongside the title of each section the tool informs you of how many students are currently enrolled in that section. Note that this number is for only the number of students in the section - if users with other roles are enrolled in the section then this number may not correspond with the number of users you can see in the interface.

If you need to remove a user from a section you can do so by clicking the 'three dots' icon to the right of their name within the section and choose Remove user. It is not possible to remove users from sections that have been added to a section via the Oxford Groups enrolment tool. These users will have a padlock beside their name to indicate this.

It is also possible to add users to sections without using the drag and drop method. Click the "+" icon to the right of their name in the list of users. This will cause a drop-down menu to appear with a list of sections. Click the name of the section that you would like the user to be added to.

Screenshot showing the dropdowm menu method of adding a user to a section.

3. Setting Section permissions

It's possible to restrict teachers or teaching assistants (TAs) to particular sections. To do this, in the People tool click the user name of the person in question, and select the option to 'Limit this user to see only fellow section users'.

Restricting teaching assistants' permissions in this way can be useful in scenarios where they lead sections of students (all enrolled within a single Canvas course) and need to review only their allocated students' assignments in Speedgrader.
Using sections in this way is also advantageous for teachers or TAs who provide assignment feedback using the Canvas Teacher app, since allocation into sections helps to control the amount of data loaded into the app.

Think of Sections as enabling more directed student activities within a course, particularly if different sections of students are taught by different tutors.
If you want to allocate an assignment to a particular section of students (e.g. Section A taught by Tutor A): create the new section first; add the student(s) into that section; then create the assignment and allocate it to that section.
Similarly, Announcements, Discussions and Quizzes can be allocated to particular sections only.

4. Removing participants from Sections

To remove a participant from a section, in the Manage Sections view, identify the required section and user. Click on the three-dots menu and select Remove User.

In certain circumstances, in the Manage Sections view, you will see a padlock icon for certain course participants. You cannot remove a participant from a locked section for one of two reasons:

If this is the last (or only) section in which the participant is enrolled – since that would unenrol them from the course altogether.
If the student has been enrolled using the Oxford Groups (GET) tool – they would need to be de-activated using the Oxford Groups tool, otherwise they would be re-enrolled on the next run of the data synchronisation process.

Example showing participants in two different Sections, some of which they can be removed from, some of which are locked

In the above example:

Participant ‘Testing1’ has manual enrolments in both sections, so is not locked in either of them. Removing one enrolment would cause the other to become locked due to it being that person's last enrolment in the course.
Participant ‘Testing2’ has a manual enrolment in Section 1 which is not locked, but an Oxford Groups-based enrolment in Section 2, which is locked. The enrolment in Section 1 can be removed, but the one in Section 2 can't.
‘Test Student’ and ‘Testing3’ are both manually enrolled, but locked because it is their last/only enrolment.