Click here to read: Before and after Merging Courses
1. How do I merge my courses?
2. Will I lose course content after having it merged?
3. I teach a DLC course. What do I need to know about merging courses?
Well, it depends. In a DLC (digital learning cooperative) course, your students likely come from more than one campus. The first student from a campus registers for your course triggers the creation of a campus-specific section. For example, if 3 students are from the Berks campus, 1 student from Abington, and the rest are from Erie, you will see three campus-specific sections under your Canvas account – Erie, Berks, and Abington. Since we cannot control when students choose to enroll in your class, it is possible to see a new section created before the add/drop period ends.
If you have merged Erie and Berks sections before the Abington student registered the class, you will need to add the newly-created section to the merged course (see the portion titled Add Another Section to a Merged Course) so that the Abington student can have access. Once you have the Abington roster in the merged course, additional Abington students, if any, will be automatically added to your class.
Tips for DLC instructors
- Do not merge the course too early;
- Keep an eye on new course sections created by new enrollment. It should stablize after the add/drop period ends;
- Course merge is actually the merge of rosters, thus do not manually add students to your course and leave the rosters unmerged.
4. Can I allow an assignment to have individual due dates for each section?
5. I teach 2 sections of a course. Students attend the lecture together but they come to labs in 4 sections due to limited room capacity. Which sections should I merge, the 2 lectures or the 4 labs? Is there a difference?
We recommend merge the higher number of sections and use that merged course space for teaching. In this case, we recommend merge the 4 sections of labs. This way, for each lab assignment you can have 4 specific due dates, one for each original lab section. If you merged the 2 lectures, you will only have 2 different due dates for each lab assignment.
Note: DO NOT try to unmerge the lectures and remerge the labs in the middle of the semester. If you change your base course you will lose all student-generated information, including submissions, posts, and grades.
6. Can I add or remove a section after a course is merged? Can I unmerge a course?
7. Under People, can I sort students and their ID pictures by section?
8. Can I tell which student is from which section when manually assigning them to different project groups?
9. Can I still send Canvas emails to students in the individual sections after the merge?
Yes. You can do this in the Inbox in Canvas by composing a new message, selecting the course, and in the dropdown menu in the To: field selecting the course section.
Please be aware that your roster may still be changing at the beginning of the semester. Students who joined the class late will not see the course emails sent earlier. Therefore, we recommend communicating with the class via Canvas Announcements which will always be available for everyone in the class. If you don’t want students to comment on course announcements, you can disable the commenting feature.
10. In the merged gradebook, can I see student grades by section? What about in SpeedGrader?
Yes, in SpeedGrader, go to any student submission, then click on the small downward arrow next to the student’s name, mouse over Showing: All Sections, then you can switch to a different section from the menu.