How to give a subset of students early access to assignments?

Question

Ten students in my class of 180 are peer TAs, able to help classmates with their assignments. The peer TAs are expected to submit their own assignments early. I know how to make an assignment available to a student early. Do I need to paste in all ten students' names for all of these assignments, or is there a way to put the students in some sort of set that enables me to treat them as a unit?

I do not want these students to have all the privileges of TAs: They should not see quizzes early or be able to see or enter grades.

TrishaMeyer1 · Accepted Answer

Hi @EllenSpertus ,

The answer to your question depends on how your course is set up and rostered and whether you have to sync to a separate Student Information System (SIS). If you have the rights to create sections, you could create a section for these students and then assign things to that whole section for a different date. They could also remain in the main section (the whole course roster), if needed/desired; students can be in more than one section.

Some caveats:

Your institution may not allow you the rights to create sections.

If you need to sync to an SIS, creating more sections will interfere with that process. A workaround is to send grades manually.

If you use Canvas Attendance, there may be ramifications from adding sections. I don't know because I have never used that program.

Note that you cannot use Canvas Groups for the purpose you describe; the Groups feature serves a different purpose.