Hi everyone, it’s David from technology. In this video we’re going to go over how cross-listing works, how to keep your sections straight, and what you can do after you’ve cross-listed them together.

What cross-listing does is it essentially moves the entire enrollment from one course into another course. It’s important to know that only the people move, not the course content or anything students have created or submitted, and for that reason, we only recommend cross-listing before the start of the term. Otherwise, you risk losing access to student submissions that were made in the merged course.

So I have two sections of my test course, Canvas100, that you can see on my Canvas Dashboard. The two sections are opened up in these two tabs here, and you can see that this first one is a fully fleshed-out course, with me as the teacher and one student, while the second one has no content, just me and a different student. I don’t want to have to create and update all of my pages and assignments in two places, so what I want to do is cross-list this otherwise empty course into the one that already has my materials. That way everything will be available to both sections of students, and I only have to maintain one set of files.

The important piece of information to capture when cross-listing is the course_id of this first course, the one with the content in it already, and I can find that up in the address bar – it's this five-digit code right here, 14846. So I’ll copy or write down 14846, and then go into the course I want to merge, the one without any content. Down at the bottom left, I’ll click on Settings, and then on the next page I’ll see this set of tabs across the top. I’ll click on the Sections tab, because what I’m actually cross-listing are the sections. Then I'll click the section name, and at the top-right there’s the Cross-list this Section button.

When I click that button, it opens a little window asking me which course I want to merge this one into, and this is where that five-digit code comes in handy. Because you could type the course name into this top field, but that'll bring up a list of every course you’ve ever taught, and you probably don’t want to page through that. Instead, if you type the five digits into this field, 14846, and then click out, it’ll show you the one specific course you want. Once you confirm that this is indeed the correct course, click the blue Cross-List This Section button, and you will get a message saying that the cross-list was successful.

Now if I go back to my Canvas Dashboard and refresh, it will look like one course disappeared. In actuality, the course still exists, but because the enrollments have moved, it doesn’t display to you anymore. If I refresh the remaining course page, it looks the same, but when I go into People, I can now see that I have myself as the teacher in two sections, and there are now two students in my course. But how do I tell which section each student is in? Here’s how to keep them straight.

If I go back into Settings, and then back to the Sections tab, I can see the two sections that are now a part of this course. But they’re both labeled Canvas 100, so let's fix that. Notice that each section has a little pencil icon next to it. I can click the pencil icon and rename the sections. Let’s call this one Period 1 and this one Period 2. Now if I go back into People, I can tell at a glance which section a student is in. If I go into my Grades area, I can now filter my gradebook by section. This View menu has a Filters option where I can choose to add a Sections filter. That filter appears up here near the search bar, and I can now filter to view grades from just one section.  

I can also target announcements, assignments, and Inbox messages to just one section as well. I’ll show you how to do assignments now; but know that announcements are done much the same way; if you want to learn about using the Inbox tool for just one section, there’s another video that I’ll link below the time stamps to the right. So when you create an assignment, all the way at the bottom, you can choose who you assign it to. The default is to have it due for everyone at the same time, but you can choose to only assign it to one section, like this, or you can have one due date for one section and a different due date for another section.

One last note: if you cross-list a section and then decide you want to undo the process, that’s an admin-only task, despite what the Canvas documentation may say. Please email the help desk at helpdesk@andover.edu with any requests for de-cross-listing or other Canvas questions.