Co-Convened Course with 2 Separate Weighted Grades?

Good afternoon,

I am seeking some help on a predicament that a faculty member posed to us (instructional designers on campus) by which I'm currently befuddled.

This is a summary of their issue:

They have 2 separate courses that they are combining into one Canvas Course. It will consist of undergraduate and graduate students (co-convened). They intend to use a weighted grading system as opposed to point-based, but the weighted assignment groups will differ between their graduate and undergraduate students.

It'd look something like this :

Assignment	Undergraduate	Graduate
(8) Lab exercises	42 % (lowest dropped)	42 % (lowest dropped)
(8) Peer-assessments of lab exercises	8%	8%
Initial map presentation	20%	10%
Final map presentation	25%	20%
class participation	5%	0%
LPSC-style abstract	0%	20%

I'd love for your input on how I might be able to advise this particular professor. Thank you so much for reading.

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Chris_Hofer

@JordanGarciaNAU ...

Full discloser...I am a Canvas administrator and do not teach courses, so this is just my initial thought as I read through your question. There may be other ways I've not thought of to accomplish what you are asking, and I would welcome feedback from Community members to post with their suggestions, too.

When you say that the two courses (one undergrad and the other graduate) are combined, do you mean that the two courses are cross-listed in Canvas? If this is the case, cross-listing two or more courses in Canvas does not move content. It only moves enrollments. For example, if I have two sections of Board Games 101 and 102, if I cross-list both of these courses together, all enrollments for both courses would show up in the "People" tab of section 101 (or 102...if I wanted them all in there instead). Within "People", I would be able to identify who was enrolled in 101 and who was enrolled in 102. Cross-listing doesn't move assignments or other course content from one course to another.

If you are going to weight assignment groups like you have detailed in your table, I believe you're going to need to leave the courses separated and not cross-listed. Weighting assignment groups needs to total 100%. [Though, this Guide does say you can go above or below 100% -- How do I weight the final course grade based on as... - Instructure Community - 746 (canvaslms.com)] Keeping them as two separate courses would allow you to use the varied weights that you're wanting.

I hope this helps in some way. Good luck!

paul_fynn

JordanGarciaNAU

The way that we experience crosslisting is that we start with Course A & Course B, each of which we pre-populate from our SIS with Teachers, Students and Assignments. Assignments are configured according to the course requirements in the SIS, and then configured in detail outside of Canvas to provide the correct 'Assignment Shell' in Canvas.

When we create a crosslist into a third Course C, all the above are moved to the combined course C and mothballed as ZZZ course..

However, they arrive in Course C as differentiated sections based on the original Course A or Course B, or based on the SIS data that provided these.

In a SIS driven assignment enrolment process, only the students who were in the original Course A will see Course A Section Assignments in C , and same with Course B.

So you will end up with two sections, two sets of assignments, two marking schemes etc., and in an SIS driven process never the twain shall meet ....

IF you are manually enrolling students and adding them to assignments (which might be by csv upload) then you need to think carefully about your need to distinguish the students, assignments, marking rubric and final grades (which will be driven by your institutional requirements).

In the case you have described you require separate and distinct grading, which means students need to be in differentiated assignments, which means that you need to allocate students to the appropriate assignment and grading scheme (associated with the assignment or assignment rubric).

The most straightforward way to achieve this is by manually setting up sections, then allocating students to the sections (which can be achieved via spreadsheet/csv)

In our institution we have SIS based cohorts, and the cohort code (in our case Year, Course Code, Trimester and Location) is included

In the name of the name of the course
In the name of the section
In the name of the assignment

Our student (and section) are controlled by the SIS through an intermediary local software program, and we use a bolt on mechanism to stop colleagues from manually changing enrolments and due dates for summative assessments (they are free to do so for formative assessments).

Both sets of assignments will appear in Gradebook, but in separate columns. Grades from Section A will not be combined with grades from Section B, except where you have chosen to add both sections/sets of students to the same assignment.

Does that make sense ?

TrishaMeyer1

Hi @JordanGarciaNAU ,

I'm not sure about this because I haven't tried it, but I THINK your professor can set up concurrent Assignment Groups that add up to 200%. They would have, for example, U Lab Exercises (42%) and G Lab Exercise (42%), U Initial Map (20%) and G Initial Map (10%), and so on (with attendant rules).

The catch is that they would have to set up separate Assignments for Undergrad vs Grad and select the appropriate Assignment Group for each assignment.

All work assigned the the undergrads would use the U-prefaced Assignment Groups. Nothing assigned to this section would be in the G-prefaced AGs, so those percentages would just be ignored in the grade calculation. The converse would apply to the grad students.

All resources (Pages, URLs, etc) would be available to all students in both sections, but any graded Assignments, Quizzes, or Discussions would have to be assigned by section (Undergrad or Graduate).

[ETA] Looking again, you could actually use the same AGs for the Lab Exercises and Peer Assessments because they are the same percentages. That would allow the professor to assign labs across sections so that peer reviews could occur without regard to enrollment status (if desired). You would have an AG total of 150% because 50% (42% + 8%) would be shared by both groups.

BrianLester

There's only one option for weighting assignment groups for any one course - you cannot apply different weights for sections

CynthiaRubbelke

We were taught by our Canvas rep to set up 2 assignment groups for all assignments. For example, we have courses that can be taken for 2 credits or 3 credits. We set up a 2-credit assignment group for each group and an 3-credit assignment group for each group. The 2-credit groups add up to 100% and the 3-credit groups add up to 100%. The assignments are then posted to each section.

lopezjamie

Not 100% sure this addresses your question, but we did this by keeping assignments in the weighting groups but using the Assign to feature to assign to different students. In your case, since some of the weighted groups differ, you would have to either adjust the weighting or create a separate assignment group with separate assignments and use the assign to feature. Also worked when allowing students to choose assessments (like, "build a website or write a paper").

Hope this helps!

DCB_SC

I'm in a similar predicament. I have one Canvas shell that has both an honors and non-honors version of the same class. Because the vast majority of the assignments are the same and the students all meet together, it's best to have both sections within one shell. However, the honors students have additional assignments as well.

Over the years, I've tried different solutions for the grades issue. I use weighted categories and typically have four (Engagement, Assignments 1, Assignments 2, Assessments). One semester I tried having a separate Assignments 3 (honors assignments) category; all five categories added up to 100%. While honors students had a number of Assignments 3 assignments, I created a single Assignments 3 assignment for non-honors students. Periodically, I would update that "score" and it would just be those students' average from the other four grading categories. Last semester both groups had the four primary grading categories (adding up to 100%) but the honors students had Assignments 3 split between common assignments and their honors assignments. Neither of those (or other solutions I've tried) was really satisfactory for various reasons.

One possibility I was thinking of trying for the upcoming semester is perhaps having five grading categories, where the common four (Engagement, Assignments 1, Assignments 2, Assessments) add up to 100% and then making Assignments 3 be worth either 11% or 12%. My idea would be to create a single assignment there for non-honors students and simply excuse it (rather than having to constantly update it with the students' average from the other four categories). That way, the category would end up being worth about 10% or 11% for the honors students, but nothing for the non-honors students. The only issue is that I know sometimes Canvas Grades can be weird with excused assignments. (I could also make all five add up to 100% with Assignments 3 being worth 10%; in that case, the non-honors students would be graded out of 90% rather than 100%).

Does anyone know if either of these would cause issues with the way Canvas calculates grades?

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