LTI Pro: Section-Specific Scheduling

Feature Requests
1

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The problem is that in LMS course sites with more than one section, scheduling different meetings for different sections will be shown to all students enrolled in the class, regardless of which section they’re enrolled in.

For instance, say there is a course site that contains two sections of one class: one that meets at 9am and one that meets at 10:30am. If I’m the instructor for that course and schedule Zoom meetings for my 9am section, those meetings will be visible and accessible to the students in my 10:30 section. Not only will they be visible and accessible to all students in the 10:30 section, but the meetings will also be placed on those students’ LMS calendars and students will receive notifications about them. Unsurprisingly, this can cause confusion for students who are unsure of which meeting to join and issues for faculty who receive questions and complaints from students.

Describe the solution you’d like
We would like to see a section in LTI Pro that allows users to select if they’d like a meeting that they are scheduling to apply to everyone enrolled in the course or only certain sections.

For Canvas, I believe this can be done by expanding the scope of the Developer Key to include the Sections API (https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/sections.html).

Describe alternatives you’ve considered
The only alternative that we’ve been able to provide our faculty users is to title their meetings with the course sections and to communicate to students that they should ignore the Zoom meetings that don’t apply to them. However, this is not a very good alternative.

3 Likes
2

Just here to show our overwhelming support for prioritizing Section-Specific Scheduling at MIT Sloan. We have courses with many sections. In addition to the confusion this creates for students around what Zoom meeting to attend (since they see all of them), it also overloads the Canvas calendar because students will see an event for each section of the course.

This would be our #1 ask of Zoom for the Spring 2021 Term. Our current workarounds are not good alternatives, as dfenton outlines above.

2 Likes
3

At CCSF we too would like section specific Zoom meetings for our cross-listed courses; a number of lab sections would like to have separate meetings with the benefits of having it in the LTI rather than sharing a link from the Zoom website. We’d actually like to have group and user specific meetings too.

4

This would be extremely helpful for us. We have only found a single case where two different sections meet at the same and that was coincidence. Ideally, we’d be able to manage theses section specific schedules in a way that’s simple and straightforward for our faculty and students.