Unfortunately, no. VoiceThread just creates one course for all of your course’s sections and enrolls students from all of them in it. However, you have a couple of options for a workaround: manually creating a group for each section or using a Canvas blueprint course.
Using a Canvas blueprint course
“Blueprint” is a Canvas feature that allows you to have a master course with all of your course content, then sync it with multiple courses. When you sync a course with your Blueprint, all of its content is copied into them. Your courses and their enrollments will remain in separate courses in Canvas, so you’ll also have separate courses for them in VoiceThread.
If you need to make changes in your courses after their initial sync, you can simply make them in your blueprint master course, then push the changes out to all of your sections with the click of a button.
NOTE: Only someone with admin-level access will be able to create a master blueprint course, so send me an email if you’d like to request one.
Manually creating groups for your sections in VoiceThread
Students in a combined-section Canvas course won’t really have any issues if you’re just creating lecture presentations or “Watch” assignments with VoiceThread.
However, if you plan to use VoiceThread for “Create” or “Comment” assignments, students will be able to see one another’s presentations and/or comments across all of your sections, so you’ll want to manually create groups in VoiceThread for each section. Fortunately, the students in all of your sections will appear in your VoiceThread account since it’ll recognize them through your combined-section Canvas course’s enrollment.
The challenge, here, is with sharing. You and your students will need to make sure you’re sharing your VoiceThread presentations with their section’s group rather than the VoiceThread class.
Which of these options is right for you? Consider these factors:
- If you’re only using VoiceThread to create videos for students to watch (even as a “Watch” assignment), it should be fine for them to remain in the combined-section course in VoiceThread.
- If the main reason you combine your sections in Canvas is so that you only have to update content in one place, a blueprint will be your best option. Also, some faculty find having to toggle between sections in a single course a bit frustrating; if this is the case for you, a blueprint will provide the additional benefit of being able to keep your section enrollments separate!
- If you’re planning to have students add comments to a VoiceThread presentation, you’ll definitely want to make sure their sections are somehow separate in VoiceThread. Otherwise, you’ll have an incredible number of comments on a presentation!