Merging Sections

WARNING: If you want to create separate ZOOM meetings for your sections...it will NOT WORK with cross-listed courses. 

The act of merging your courses (sections) in Canvas is called "cross-list". Cross-listing should be done while courses are unpublished. Coursework is retained with the course, not with the section enrollments, so if a published course is cross-listed, all cross-listed enrollments will lose any associated assignment submissions and grades. If you have this problem, please email canvassupport@calpoly.edu and request the sections (full course ID's - ex: ENGL-101-01-2228 & ENGL-101-02-2228) to be "de-cross-listed". 

Sections can only reside in one site at a time. So, you can't enroll students in a lab site AND a combined site.

Pros 

• Once and done content creation (add content in one course section and the other course sections will see it as well).
• Less updating needed (if you make a change in one section, the other sections will automatically update with the changes).
• Access the full course roster (students in all the cross-listed course sections will show up in the Gradebook and under People).
• You can create section-specific assignments,  events, graded discussions, and quizzes or assign a common activity to all sections.

Cons

• No reversing (once the course is cross-listed, you cannot separate the sections without losing all student submissions and grades).
• All the cross-listed sections or courses will now have the parent course's name in Canvas (e.g. if you are cross-listing BIO-101-01 and BIO-101-02, both these courses will be named the parent course, which most likely will be BIO-101-01). Students may get confused and think they were enrolled in the wrong section (which they weren't), so you might just want to make an announcement or send them an email about it.
• The courses that have been cross-listed (merged) will no longer appear in your Dashboard. 
• Since the courses are now only one shell, you can not have different dates within the same course. You would need to use Groups/Group Sets to create activities for sections if you wanted different dates/times. You can also use the Assign To feature to create different dates/times (just like for DRC accommodations)
• Creating section-specific announcements, files, pages, and modules is a bit more complicated (As of now, it can only be done by setting up student groups for each section and adding content within the group pages. Otherwise, all sections will see the content you add to these areas).
• You cannot mute section-specific assignment grades. You either have to mute all sections or none.
• If you are using the Zoom integration in Canvas, students will have access to all Zoom meetings.
• While you can filter by section under People and in the Gradebook, if you export the Gradebook into Excel, all the sections will be exported.
• There is no way to view the course (student view) for a student by section.