Designing a personalized learning experience in Canvas often requires a careful balance between providing specialized support and maintaining a well-organized, manageable course structure. While Canvas Groups and Sections have their function for student organization, Differentiation Tags is a new tool to help you deliver targeted instruction with even greater precision and privacy.
What Are Differentiation Tags?
Differentiation Tags allow you to create custom labels and assign them to specific students or groups of students. Unlike Sections or Groups, these tags are completely invisible to students. This "behind-the-scenes" layer of organization allows you to categorize students based on specific needs, progress, required accommodations, or any needed way to sort students without creating public-facing labels.
Once a student is tagged via the People page, the tags become a selectable option in the "Assign To" field. This means that you can deliver specific assignments, quizzes, and even entire modules to just the students carrying a particular tag.
Benefits for Personalized Learning
The true power of Differentiation Tags lies in the flexibility they offer for responsive course delivery and design. Because tags can be created quickly and adjusted throughout the semester, they are ideal for a multitude of instructional scenarios:
- Tiered Assignments: Easily provide challenge or extension work to students who are ready to go deeper into a topic, or offer scaffolded versions of an assignment to those who need more support.
- Discreet Accommodations: For students who require additional time or alternative formats, tags provide a professional and private way to manage these needs without cluttering your "Assign To" lists with individual names.
- Language Support: If you have a cohort of students who benefit from translated materials or supplemental language resources, you can tag them to ensure they receive those specific files directly.
- Make-Up Work: Tagging students who were absent or need a retake allows you to reopen assessments for a specific subset of the class.
Benefits for Instructors
Beyond content delivery, Differentiation Tags streamline the administrative side of teaching. They enable more powerful filtering in the Gradebook, allowing you to view the progress of specific student tags at a glance. Additionally, tags integrate with the Canvas Inbox, making it easy to send targeted communication to a specific "tag set" without having to manually select names from a roster.
This tool replaces the need for long, manual lists of students with simple, reusable labels that reflect your current needs.
Getting Started with Tags
Ready to try it out? Head to the People page in your Canvas course to create your first Tag Set.
- Define your tags: Think about the common "sub-groups" you frequently manage (e.g., "Extension Group," "Make-up Lab," or "Section A-Support").
- Assign tags to students: Apply these labels to individual students based on your current course data.
- Apply to content: Use the "Assign To" box on your next assignment to see how much faster it is to target your instruction.
For technical details and step-by-step instructions, check out the following resources:
Author
Dr. Christopher Mechell, Academic Technology Services