The first time you create sections in your course, all course participants are automatically distributed into sections. To make your own distribution, you will need to alter the initial Brightspace enrollments . It is not possible to automatically enroll students into sections who enroll for your course in OSIRIS, as is the case for groups.
Participants that enroll in your course after you have created sections, will only automatically be added to sections if the option Auto-enrol new users is enabled in the Section properties. They will be added to the section with the lowest number of participants. If this option is not enabled, new participants are not added to a section.
Because of the limited search bar functionality and having to manually enroll each individual participant, it can take a lot of time to sort all participants according to your needs. Keep this in mind if you want to use sections and have a large number of course participants.
Manually sorting participants into sections is done via the Manage Sections page. Sorting can be done in two ways.
- Via the Enrol Users button you will go to an overview where all sections are shown. From here, you can add or remove participants within all sections.
- 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.
Both ways make use of the Enrol Users page.
- The drop-down menu under Display lets you choose which sections you want to show on this page. Here, you can choose between All Sections (all selected sections) or a specific section.
- In the search bar, you can search by name (first and/or last name) or U, Z, E, or S number of the participants. It is not possible to filter by user type. So, for example, you cannot search for all participants with the Teacher role.
- Via Show Search Options, you can choose which filters the search bar should use, such as the first name or last name. You can also choose whether you only want to show participants who are already enrolled in a section (Enrolled), those not yet enrolled in a section (Not Enrolled), or both (tick both options).
- This is a list of all sections (or the sections you filtered on) and all course participants (or the participants you searched for). Behind the name of the course participants, you can check in which section this participant should be sorted. It is possible to assign a participant to more than one section.
- Finally, click Save to save all changes. It is recommended to do this regularly to avoid losing large amounts of work if the browser is closed unexpectedly or when you perform a search.
By only enabling the Not Enrolled option under Show Search Options and then searching with an empty search bar, you will get an overview of all participants who are not yet in one of the shown sections. This is useful to keep track of which participants you still have to enroll in a section. Make sure to save before using the search bar again, otherwise your changes will be lost.
When sorting participants into sections, it is recommended to show all sections via the Enrol Users button. If you have made a selection of sections, you only see the columns of those sections. However, you do see all participants of the entire course. Only for selected sections do you see who has been added. Of the other participants, it looks like they are in no section, while they might be in one of the other sections. If you filter on Not Enrolled, it also looks at who is not in selected sections, and not who is not a section in the whole course. So you get a false impression who is enrolled to any section or not.