How do I assign items to students with differentiated tags as an instructor?

This guide applies to institutions who have opted-in to the Differentiation Tags feature preview. If your user interface displays differently, the feature has not been enabled at your institution. To learn more about the feature preview, ask questions, or comment on functionality, navigate to the Differentiation Tags user group.

A Canvas administrator will need to enable Differentiation Tags setting at the account level or sub-account level. This setting can also be locked for sub-accounts.

You can use differentiation tags to assign specific content to customized sets of students. These sets are not visible to students. Additionally, admins can access differentiation tags through Canvas Data for reporting and analysis.

Notes:

  • If the Differentiation Tags feature option is enabled and locked at the root account, the sub-account setting will display. However, if the feature option is enabled and unlocked at the root account but disabled in the sub-account, the sub-account setting will not be displayed.
  • Both the Differentiation Tags Feature Option and Account setting must be enabled.
  • CSV upload is not currently supported.
  • Differentiation tags are not retained during course exports or imports.
  • Each course is limited to 40 tags total and 10 variants per tag set.
  • There is no limit to the total number of tags a student can have; however, a student can only be assigned one tag per tag set.

Open People

Open People

In Global Navigation, click the People link.

View People Page

View People Page

In the People page of a course, click the Manage Tags button.

Note: Due to permission caching, changes may take up to an hour to appear unless a users cache is manually cleared in Canvas.

View Manage Tags

Enable Setting

In the Manage Tags tray, click the Get Started button.

Manage Tags Tray

Manage Tags Tray

In the Manage Tags tray, you can add a Tag [1], edit an existing tag [2] or delete a tag [3].

Edit Tag

Edit Tag

When editing a tag, you can change from a single tag to multiple tags [1], and add additional tags to a tag set [2].

View Assign To

View Assign To

In the Assign To field, you can assign items to students with specific tags.

Notes:

  • When a student belongs to multiple tags or sections with conflicting due dates for the same assignment, the assignment with the latest due date will apply. However, if there's an individual override set for the student, that due date will take precedence over all others.
  • Tags are not supported for Group Assignments and will not appear as an option when creating them.