Locking self sign up groups from opening in a group set until the previous group is full.

Question

When creating multiple self sign up groups is it possible to lock a group from opening until the group before it has been filled?

eg.

Say you had 3 study groups with a limit of 10 students and you had a possible cohort of anywhere between 15 and 30. You would want to avoid any individual ending up in one of the study groups on there own as much as possible.

So you would want group A to stay open until 10 individuals joined and Group B/ C not to open up until Group A had closed. Thus preventing the need to move students between groups or having them sat in groups on their own.

(of course I am aware that their may be a situation where you get 21 learners for example and in that case would just amend the group size of one of the groups and move the lone individual). What I am attempting to prevent is the below:

Group A - 10

Group B - 9

Group C - 1

or similar.

How have others resolved this in the past on courses where numbers are not always guaranteed to be the same?

ColtonSwapp · Accepted Answer

Hello @GemmaWestwood

Thanks for posting this in the Canvas Community!

If you create a self-sign up group, currently it will create as many groups as you specify. If you want to have 3 groups with 10 students each, it will display those when the student visits the group section of the people page and allow them to join either of them that are available. There is not a way to make it so that you can lock a group from opening until the group before it has been filled.

The only way I know of on how to do this would be manually creating the groups within the set until they fill up. Once they fill up, you could create the next group and wait for students to sign up. This seems like it might be a limitation with groups in Canvas.

This might make a great feature request for future Canvas releases. I do see how that would be useful. HERE is a link to the ideas page if you want to submit this idea to Canvas.

Hopefully this helps!

-Colton