Discussions created in a course include all of the students in the course (regardless of the section). You can set up different due dates but they all participate on the same board. 


Possible Mitigation


This means you have three options: 

  1. Create the discussion as normal and allow the students to participate in cross-listed sections as well. This can be problematic especially when it comes to pacing since these classes likely meet at different intervals throughout the week. 
  2. Create a different discussion for each section. This solution keeps the student "confined" to that of their own classmates but it is more time-consuming for the instructor (since you have to create a Discussion assignment for each section. The result of this option might look something like this: 
    • Weekly Discussion (for Monday/Wednesday class) 
    • Weekly Discussion (for Tuesday/Thursday class) 
    • Weekly Discussion (for Tuesday/Friday class) 
  3. However, recently Canvas has changed the way that Group Discussions work so now you can assign a group a discussion and the discussion is confined within that group. To do this though, you will have to set up a “Group” for each of your sections. The good thing is that you only have to do it once. The "how to do this" is split up into two parts. 
    • First is the Setup. The Setup you only have to do once per term. 
    • The second part is the Follow Through (this is the part that you have to repeat for every discussion). It is the same process that you would normally go through to assign multiple sections to an assignment or discussion. 


The Setup (do once per term)


  1. Create a Group set on your People page for Sections. 
  2. Under the Sections group set, create a group of each cross-listed section. (MW, TT, WF in our example) 
  3. Assign the students from those sections to their appropriate groups. 


The Follow Through (do for each discussion)


Also, see Canvas' documentation for this process.

  1. Create the Discussion by entering a topic and content the way you normally would for a discussion. 
  2. Tick the "This is a Group Discussion" checkbox. 
  3. Choose the Sections Groupset. 
  4. Use the Assign toolbox to create the desired timelines for each group. Make sure you include Assign boxes for all of the different timelines.