When faculty members are teaching more than one section of the same course, we actually create separate Moodle courses for each individual section, along with a merged course that combines the enrollments of the individual sections. Faculty members very often choose to build (and to make visible to students) only the merged course, so that faculty members can upload course-related documents into one central space. One drawback of using a merged course, though, is the combining of course rosters in the Gradebook. From Moodle’s perspective, the merged course is just a single course, and all the students enrolled in it are listed in the Gradebook in alphabetical order, regardless of their individual section. To make grading easier, faculty members can create separate groups in the merged course for each of the component sections, which also allows the faculty member to restrict content to a particular group (using the "Restrict access" setting when posting the content) and to send email messages to particular groups (using the Quickmail block). If you haven’t yet created groups in your course, then the process of sorting the Gradebook by a particular group would involve three steps:
- creating groups in the course,
- changing the group mode for the course (temporarily) to "Separate groups" or "Visible groups," and
- sorting the Gradebook by group.
Here are detailed instructions on how to perform all three of those steps.