Within a course site, Canvas sections are designed to assist with creating differentiated due dates for groups of students and for managing multiple graders, TAs, and instructors while ensuring privacy for students. In Northwestern Canvas, instructors can manually create sections only within a custom course site. For courses that require registration in CAESAR, a Canvas Admin must create the custom sections. Please email canvas@northwestern.edu for assistance creating custom sections in a CAESAR-based Canvas course site.

Please see these pages for additional information about Canvas sections:

NOTE: Most courses already have their own specific Canvas course, consult Intro to Sections and Course Combines for more information on section management.

Canvas Sections Use Cases

Differentiated due dates and assignments

If there are multiple sections within a course, instructors have the option to assign each section its unique version of an assignment, discussion, or quiz. Even if the assignment is the same for all sections within a course, instructors can also assign unique due dates to each section.

Learn more about differentiated assignments and due dates.

Multiple Graders

If there are multiple sections within a course, it is possible to assign an instructor, TA, or grader to specific sections rather than the entire course. This prevents them from seeing any student work outside of the section.

Another use case involves assigning instructors to both an individual section and the class as a whole. In this scenario, instructors would be able to use a filter in the grade book to only see the students they are assigned to.

Overarching Course Enrollment

The Canvas course serves as the overarching course section. When manually adding students or staff to individual sections within a course, it is important to note this overarching enrollment. If an instructor, TA, or grader is enrolled in the overarching course as well as their specific section, they will be able to see student submissions outside of their sections.

If this presents a privacy issue, ensure the staff member is only enrolled in specific sections and not the overarching course. Learn how to edit the section enrollments of a Canvas course.