With Sections you can sort students and lecturers into two or more sections within a course. Lecturers and students who've been sorted into a section can only see other members of their section, and lecturers can only view the submitted assignments of students in their section.
To make use of Sections within your course, you first need to enable this function. If you have not done this yet, you can learn how to in this manual.
Creating sections in Brightspace
Creating sections is done exclusively within your course in Brightspace. It is not possible to automatically sort students who enroll for your course in OSIRIS into sections, as is the case for groups.
Please note: when you are creating sections, there is no option to create empty sections. Brightspace will automatically distribute all participants in your course into the number of sections you create. Brightspace does not take into account what role the participant has within the course. Participants with the Teacher role and below are also automatically placed into a section. Learn more about how to re-distribute participants into sections in this manual.
In order to create a section:
- Go to Administration in the navbar of your course.
- Click Course Admin.
- Next, click Sections under the Learner Management heading.
You will now end up on the Manage Sections page.
- Click Create Sections.
On the Create Sections page you will see a number of options for creating a section.
- Under Enrolment Type you can choose between Sections of # and # of Sections.
- If you chose Sections of #, you decide how many students should be enrolled into each section here.
If you chose # of Sections, you decide how many sections will be created here. - If you enable Auto-enrol new users, participants who are added to your course after creating sections will automatically be enrolled into the section with the lowest number of participants.
- If you enable Randomise users in Sections, the current participants of your course are randomly enrolled into the number of sections you create.
If you do not enable this option, current participants are enrolled based on the order of the classlist. - You can also create a discussion forum and a topic for each section here. To do this, enable the option Set up discussion areas. Take a look at this manual for more information about creating discussions forums and topics for sections.
- Click Create to create the sections.
After creating sections, you will return to the Manage Sections page. You should now be able to see the sections you just created. From here, you can add new sections and re-distribute the participants into the sections.
Managing sections via Manage Sections
- With the Add Section button, you can add new sections. Click here for more information.
- Via Enrol Users, you can add new participants to existing sections and re-distribute participants who are already enrolled in a section. View this manual for more information about this option.
- The View Sections button will show an overview of all sections and the members of these sections.
- Via Edit Overall Section Properties, you can adjust the settings that are also shown when creating sections.
- This is the section overview. Here you can find all sections you have created. By clicking the section name in the second column, you can edit the name and description. By clicking the user count in the third column, an overview of all members of that section will appear.
- By selecting one or more sections in the section overview and clicking the Email button, you can send an email to all members of the selected section(s).
- By selecting one or more sections in the section overview and clicking the Enrol button, you can add or remove students within the selected section(s). This is handy if you are using a large number of sections and want to only edit two or three at the same time, for example.
- By selecting one or more sections in the section overview and clicking the Delete button, you can permanently delete the selected section(s). After clicking this button, a pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm your choice.
Please note: after deleting a section, the current members of that section are not automatically sorted into other sections if the option Auto-enrol new users is not enabled in the Section properties. You will manually have to add these course participants to a new section.
Adding new sections
At the top of the page, click Add Section. A pop-up window will now appear.
- Under Section Name, enter the name of the section. This name is visible only to the course coordinator and members of this section. Members of other sections only see their own section and cannot see the name of this new section.
- Under Section Code, Brightspace automatically fills in a code corresponding to the number of the section. It is recommended not to change this code since it is only used internally. As course coordinator, you will not use this code any further.
- Under Description, you can enter a description for the section. Again, this is only visible to the course coordinator and the members of this section. Entering a description is not mandatory.
- Finally, click the blue Add button at the bottom of the page to save and create the section. The section now appears in the section overview.