Updated: 10/17/2023

The detailed guidance below will walk you through the how-to steps and resources for setting up sections, assigning students to sections, and assigning event dates to sections. If you're comfortable with this, you may want to skip to ensuring you've set up your events assigned to sections using this Canvas guide.

How-To Steps

For screenshots, go to the Canvas Instructor Guides links in resources below.

Set up sections. Ensure you have set up sections in your course for each rotation. Go to course settings, sections, and add sections for each rotation.
Ensure students are assigned to a section. When you enroll students in your course (or ask me to), ensure you have assigned students to a section. If you don't know the student's rotation yet, they can be left unassigned to a section. However, when you do know the rotation then assign a section to the student. This is done in the people tab.
Assign event dates to sections. When creating an event in the course calendar, click more options and navigate to the box to select a different date for sections. This will allow you to assign the event to a section of students and even different dates for different sections. For example, if your clerkship has a Welcome session the first Monday of each rotation, then you can create a Welcome event and assign each rotation to a different date. If you have already created the event, you can edit the event to assign to a section of students.

Why is this important?

If you create events and do not assign the event to a section of students, then all students in the course will see all the events in the course. This can be confusing to students in Rotation 1 since they see events for Rotation 2, 3, etc. Often students in the MD program use the iCal sync between Canvas and their own calendar such as Google or Outlook. Having a lot of irrelevant events populate in the student calendar outside of Canvas has been reported as confusing. A key solution is for all of our MD courses to assign events to sections of students, when possible, to reduce the number of irrelevant events students see - which will likely help students know where to be and when.

Resources

You can find a lot of information in the Canvas Guides, but these items below are great places to get started.

	Setting up sections
	Assigning students to sections during enrollment
	Editing students' sections
	Subscribe to the Calendar (Sync)
	Adding events (including to sections of students and duplicating events) (5:36)

	As you are designing, consult the Tips resource!
	For help, contact your Duke Med Canvas Admin