Course Section Management
Here's a mismatch that's been quietly costing you evenings: you teach the same course three, four, five times a day — but they're not the same class. Second period is a week ahead of sixth. Your block-schedule group meets Tuesdays, not Mondays. One roster syncs to one Canvas course, another to a different one. Until now, that meant duplicating the same Lingua course over and over just to keep the rosters and the due dates straight. v3.2.0 fixes that at the root: one course, split into sections — each with its own students, its own schedule, and its own Canvas gradebook.
One Course, Many Periods
A Lingua course starts out simple: one join code, one roster, everyone on the same page. That's exactly right if you teach it once. But if you teach Spanish 2 to four different groups a day, you don't want four separate courses to build assignments into four times over — you want one course that knows it has four class periods inside it.
That's what sections are. In your course settings you flip a course from single to multiple sections, name them the way you actually think about them — "Period 2," "Period 6," "B-Block" — and each one gets its own join code to hand out. Students land in the right period from the moment they join. Your assignments, your content, your rubrics all still live in one place; the sections just sort the people.
Every period gets its own door
Each section carries its own join code, so there's no risk of a student wandering into the wrong period. Need to reset one? Regenerate just that section's code and the rest keep working untouched.
Assign to Everyone, or Just One Period
When you build an assignment, you decide who gets it. The default is the sane one — all sections, everybody, no extra thought required. But right there in the create screen is an "Assign to Sections" choice, and the moment you want to hand something to only your third period — a make-up, a section that's running ahead, a quiz just for the group that covered the unit — you pick the sections and only those students ever see it.
It works the same when you go back to edit. Widen an assignment to another period, or pull one out — and if pulling a section out would erase work students already turned in, Lingua stops and asks first, only when there's actually something to lose. No surprises.
A Different Due Date for Every Period
This is the one that really hurt before. Your periods drift apart — a fire drill here, an assembly there — and suddenly "due Friday" means Friday for two groups and Monday for the other two. Now a single assignment can carry a different open and due date for each section. Tick "customize dates per section," set the ones that differ, and leave the rest to inherit the shared timeline. Each student sees their period's real deadline on their calendar, their dashboard, everywhere.
The timeline stays readable
When several periods happen to share the same open-and-due window, Lingua groups them into a single line instead of repeating the same dates five times. You see "Periods 2, 4, 6" on one row and the outlier on its own — the schedule at a glance, not a wall of duplicates.
Moving Students Around, Safely
Rosters shift, especially early in a term. A kid switches from your morning block to your afternoon one; a whole period gets rescheduled. When you split a single-roster course into sections, or add or remove one, Lingua opens a Rearrange Students screen and simply asks where each person goes. You get a button per student, a live count of how full each section is, and everyone starts out defaulted to where they already are — so you're only nudging the few who moved.
And it's careful with the destructive corners. Collapse a multi-section course back down to one and your students all land safely on the main roster, nothing lost. Delete a section that still has students in it and Lingua won't just guess — it asks whether you want to move those students into another period, or (with a deliberate double confirmation, because this one can't be undone) remove them and their work from the course entirely. The dangerous thing is always the one that takes two clicks and a clear warning.
The Right Grades in the Right Canvas Course
If your school runs on Canvas, here's the part that closes the loop. Most schools give each class period its own Canvas course — so one Lingua course feeding into one Canvas gradebook was never going to fit. Now you can link Canvas per section: point each period at its matching Canvas course, and when a student's grade syncs, it follows that student's section straight into the correct gradebook. Second period's scores land in second period's Canvas course, sixth period's in sixth's, automatically.
You can still link a whole course to a single Canvas course when that's what fits — it's a toggle. And switching between the two is safe: Lingua quietly unhooks the old target so nothing keeps syncing to the wrong place, but it never reaches into Canvas to delete grades you've already posted. Your past scores stay exactly where they are.
And Yes, Deo Can Do It Too
All of this is available to Deo, the assistant from v3.0.0, in plain conversation. "Assign the Day of the Dead reading to periods 2 and 4 only." "Give sixth period until next Friday." "Set the quiz to open Monday morning for period 2 and Tuesday for the rest." Deo understands your sections by name, targets the right ones, and sets per-section dates — right down to the time of day, in your timezone.
It handles extensions the same way — "give Maria and Devon three more days" — and it's sensible about them: it'll only push a deadline later than a student's real one, and it checks with you before it would wipe out work anyone already submitted. Deo won't reshape a course's sections for you — that stays your call, in settings — but everything about who gets what, and when, it can take off your plate.
Speaks in real times now, not just days
Ask Deo for "Friday evening" or "end of day next Tuesday" and it lands on an actual hour — evening reads as 6 PM, end-of-day as 11:59, a bare due date defaults to just before midnight — all resolved in your own timezone.
The Short Version
One course, as many periods as you teach. Separate join codes, separate rosters, separate due dates, separate Canvas gradebooks — with a clean way to move students between them and a careful hand around anything that can't be undone. No more cloning the same course five times just to keep your day straight. That's v3.2.0. Split your course into sections and let each period be exactly what it already is.