As you test and explore Differentiation Tags, please use this space to note any bugs/features that aren't working as intended you encounter. If you can share screencasts or links to the behavior, that may be helpful.
Hello! Already shared this with my CSM but curious if others are experiencing this.
Also, unrelated. I see the auto-saved content message on this forum. Anything like that coming to discussion? 😄
Hi @James-Kocher,
We’ve resolved the issue of it incorrectly showing in all courses and updated the enablement instructions. You can find the updated instructions here. If anything still feels off, definitely let us know—we appreciate you helping us catch this early!
For the Assign To issue, with our feature flag update could you check to see if it's on for the sub-account that you're testing in? If it is and you're still not seeing Tags in the Assign To list please send me a link to the course and I'd be happy to take a look.
Hi @SamGarza1,
When I'm testing this, I'm getting a n error when trying to add a tag to some users. Is this perhaps because the users are admins (but in this test course as students)?
-Chris
Hi Sam,
University of Manchester here (the UK one, not the US one!).I am also having a problem seeing Tags within the Assign to dropdown. I've done all the checks...
I still do not see the Tagged options in the Assign to dropdown.
Testing course:
https://uom.instructure.com/courses/568
Is there anything else I should be checking or trying?
Thanks!
See this has been mentioned above but firing up a different thread. I'm also having an issue when trying to assign tags to users from my course's People page. This is at The University of Manchester in the following Sandbox course: https://canvas.manchester.ac.uk/courses/397/Please can this be looked into? Thanks!
We're still having issues getting the tags activated in a sub-subaccount.
https://umich.instructure.com/accounts/1627
The main campus instance isn't going to do the testing, we're only going to do the opt-in adopter portion at Ross (business school) and initially I'd like it only turned on for a sub-account inside the ross subaccount (56)
Our campus level admin hasn't been able to locate the feature to turn it on.
Are you able to look into it and see which settings may need to be enabled so we can start testing the feature?
Hello, I have the same error doFetchApi to add tags in my course:
In my course i have sections enrollments, in my case I delete the secction enrollment and with this adjust I solve the error.
For this case, Differentation tags not compatibility with sections?
I was trying to test to see what would happen if you had a tag used as an assign-to filter on an assignment, then deleted it and restored it (after creating a new tag with the same name)
Unfortunately it failed to restore from the /undelete.
Even when there was no tag with the same name it would not restore.
Is there anywhere in the non-api where we can identify a tag by it's internal tag number, like a group or assignment number besides putting in the trashcan and seeing the number there?
https://umich.instructure.com/courses/767262/undelete/group_category_61654 -- the undelete restore button -- I suppose we could do that on the beta site
Not a big fan of the ability to name a tag group the same as a currently existing one (one that is not deleted). This also applies to groupsets and group names incidentally.
We're having an issue launching Speedgrader via tag. Launch SpeedGrader Filtered by Student Group is turned on in course settings, and seemingly we are able to do this from the assignment page (i.e. we can select our tags to launch in Speedgrader), but it throws up an error message upon clicking to launch Speedgrader that we can't get to to the bottom of:Anyone able to replicate or spot something obvious we might be missing?
Just identified another issue relating to roles (at least in our instance)- Grader and External Examiner roles cannot filter SpeedGrader by tag (presumably as permissions stop them seeing the course People page, and therefore by association, tags too)- Course administrator - can see People page, but cannot see anything related to tagsIs this a standard role set up, or something that we've configured at UoM? Grader, in particular, is going to be an issue if you cannot filter via tag EDIT: Confirmed that these are in fact custom roles that we've configured at UoM and will have to work around
Tag Sets
In the introduction video, the presenter says that "Students can have multiple individual tags, but only one tag from a set". In my testing, I created a tag set with three variants and added the same student in every variant of the same tag set.
I am a Primary Sub-Account who just enabled Differentiation Tags. For whatever reason, the button is not visible in the People area. Does the Root Acct Admin have to enable as well?
@SamGarza1 It seems that if you enable the Diff Tags for an assignment you have to use them for EVERY assignment in that unit. It'd be really useful if you could switch between the delegation by Diff Tag and NOT on a assignment by assignment basis.You may have a formative assessments you want to monitor as a teacher and then summative ones you where you want to delegate the marking appropriately.This may not be Diff Tags but the way the 'Launch Speedgrader by Group' setting works, that feature would appear to work better as an Assignment option NOT a course option.
@james_whalley ha sorry I mean in single Canvas Space - which for our University we call Course units. But yes the ability to use the diff tags (or not) across different assignments in a group... Is there a way that can be done easily?
Will back this up - when Launch Speedgrader by Group is enabled on a course, it is then enabled across all Assignments in that courseIf you have a assignments whereby that setting is not relevant and/or not required, it becomes quite frustrating to keep having to turn the setting off and on. Scale that up to potentially 20 different markers accessing 5 different assignments (with different requirements) in a singular course space, that blanket setting will prove problematic
Thanks Liam - much better at explaining this than me!
There appears to be a limit on the number of tags you can create. Maximum of 5 Tag Groups and a maximum of 10 tags per group. This limit does make them unusable for our needs unfortunately. Be useful to add this limit to the Diff Tag FAQ as we were quite far down our testing process when we realised this and if we'd have known earlier it would have prevented testing something tahts now unusable.Alternatively if there a way to increase that limit at the root level that would be great... Ideally we'd need 100s of them on some of our courses.
I just tested the variant limit. In the interface I was able to keep creating variants, but after creating 25 variants I saved and received the message "Validation failed: Variant limit reached for tag". If there is a limit of 10 variants the creation window needs to disable the +Variant prompt once that limit is reached, end users shouldn't be receiving error messages for doing things the application is allowing them to do. The error message also fails to communicate what that limit is, the only way to know the limit count is through trial and error.
Is there an ETA on when the bug that doesn't let us add differentiation tags to students in more than one section will be fixed?
On our beta instance, a student can be assigned MORE than one tag from a set. This is a problem.
@embleton Right. I understand it is a bug, but I actually prefer the functionality the bug is causing. Since there are users who prefer the bug and some who want it to work as designed, I was positing that they could update the functionality to meet the needs/desires of both groups of users.
@Nancy_Webb_CCSF A tag not in a set would work for that. It's probably not a huge issue. I do imagine that a few instructors will build tags within a tag set, not realizing the limitation and then be frustrated when they go to list one or two students with a second tag in the set after having gotten all of the other students assigned.
Can assignments only be assigned to a single tag at a time?
This seems a little limiting.
The assign-to interface lets me add multiple tags either as separate assign-to or in the same assign-to but after saving it only saves one tag or tag variant to the assignment.
edit: Sometimes it lets you save two groups (tags) other times it deletes one or both or all of the tags. Sometimes it even deletes sections assigned along with a tag on the same assign-to.
It seems like putting a due date helps retain tags but not all the time. I can't pin down what's exactly causing the behavior.
I was trying to assign two variants in the same tag set to an assignment and I couldn't get two to stick. Then I noticed the behavior being erratic in holding any multiple tags, variant or not.
edit 2: new observation -- the assign-to in the full edit page seems to mostly work. But the assign-to in the assign-to only pullout is the one that is deleting groups/sections after saving.
I was looking over some tag and group assignment interactions and noticed something that could cause problems.
I have a groupset with 2 groups
- Students ABC and DEF are in groups 1 and 2.
- Students ACE are in Tag TS-One Blue (a variant)
- Only Tag TS-One Blue is assigned to the group assignment (only they have editable grades in the gradebook)
However it still seems to affect the unassigned students, B D F in the gradebook.
Ideally there won't be group assignments assigned across tags that conflict with groups and groupsets but we all know it will happen.
It would be nice if there was a safeguard to prevent unintended grading results when using tags and group assignments together.
Hi @SamGarza1 Trying the CSV Diff Tag upload and finding some issues...Please can you advise...
I'm supporting a cohort of 260 students and want to be able to tag them into 52 Groups of 4 so that supervisors can work closely with their students but this is proving really difficult with the Diff Tags and this isn't really a large cohort for our institution.
Hi, @SamGarza1
I only enabled the "Add" permission for the teachers, and I am observing the following issues:
I created the tag and assigned it to students, however, the instructor doesn't see the tag icon next to the student name.
Also, when the instructor tried to delete a tag, the following pops up. They shouldn't because the "delete" permission is not enabled, however the error message is somehow confusing. It would be ideal to have a pop-up message notifying them they cannot delete the tag.
It would be helpful if the Upload CVS button is disabled when only the "add" permission is enabled.
Thank you for looking into this.
Leila Haddad
I have a student that was in a tag called "ac" and recently moved him to a different tag, "AC." I did ensure the old tag was removed; however on a canvas PAGE he sees both pages the "ac" and "AC" Canvas Pages. I removed the assigned tags to the page and the one tag to the student thinking maybe if I remove and reassign…
Why is there the setting "Lock this setting for sub-accounts and courses" if this can't be opted out at the course level? There should be an opt-out at the course level and we should also be able to have tags available and disabled by default. This is something that courses should be able to opt-into, not forced to opt-out…
Hi all, Will differentiation tags be visible in the Canvas attendance tool like sections are? Thanks! Charlotte
I previously created a set of differentiation tags for a group of classes using SIS csv file upload. These tags appeared in the classes as expected. I recently reversed action by changing the status for several of these classes so the csv file uploaded is essentially the same, but the status was changed from accepted to…
I discovered a problem when using a csv to create differentiation tags in a number of classes. After uploading the file, I noticed a typo in one of the tag_id. In my search to figure out how to change the unique identifier, I discovered a few potential bugs or enhancements needed: 1. I tried to use the change the tag_id…
 10.50.23 a.m..png "Captura de pantalla 2025-05-06 a la(s) 10.50.23 a.m..png")
 11.03.02 a.m..png "Captura de pantalla 2025-05-06 a la(s) 11.03.02 a.m..png")
