Section Info: Overview

What it does

The Section Info tool provides a way for instructors to efficiently manage sections of a class. The tool is designed to help an instructor manage a course that may consist of lectures, labs, discussions, studio work, recitations, or any combination thereof.

The Section Info tool is designed to work with other tools, such as Announcements, Gradebook, and Tests & Quizzes.

Key concepts

Sections: This tool allows you to create sections in a course site. Information you may add about a section includes days, time, assigned teaching assistant, room, current enrollment, available slots, maximum enrollment, and the section category.

Note: Depending on your implementation, you may have the option to automatically or manually manage section membership from the Options page in the Section Info tool. Membership information can be based on official registration information, or you can discontinue section and membership updates from the registration system and manually control everything. However, when you select manual mode and then return to automatic mode, you will lose all the changes you made while in manual mode.

Groups: Groups function much like sections. However, groups are managed through the Site Info tool, and they do not have the associated metadata that a section may have. Groups are never preloaded with official course data.

Section categories: Choose from several options for the type of section you wish to add. Categories include Lecture, Discussion, Lab, Studio, and Recitation.

Teaching assistants (TAs): In a course site, you may assign TAs to each section. You assign a site participant the role of teaching assistant through Site Info.

Set announcements for sections: You may set an announcement to be viewable only by a specific section. When you create a new announcement, choose from the drop-down menu which section should see the announcement.

View Gradebook by section: To view the Gradebook by section, in the Gradebook tool, choose from the drop-down menu the section you wish to view.

View Tests & Quizzes by section: You may view different assessments you have created by section by choosing the section in the drop-down menu.

Things to consider

• It is not currently possible to combine multiple courses into one "master" course, though this is under consideration as a future development. Groups and sections allow you to manage subsets of one course, but it is not yet possible to combine several courses into a superset.
  
  
• Groups are very similar to sections, but differ in some key ways. For more information, see Difference between sections and groups.
  
  
• A teaching assistant may only edit information for students in the section to which the assistant is assigned.
  
  
• The role of teaching assistant is not available in a project site.
  
  
• A section may have any number of assigned teaching assistants.
  
  
• You have the option to allow students to switch or sign up for sections.
  
  
• A participant may not be a member of more than one section in a given category.
  
  
• A section may have any number of assigned teaching assistants.