Completing Tasks Concerning Individuals in a Big Project

English Forum Use Cases
1

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to search this, and Google has been no help. The situation has got to be common, but I’ll explain my dilemma with a way easier use case than my own business.

Okay so say I am a professor at a college and I have a class of 100 students. I’ve got a project for every course I teach, but to make it easy I’m only teaching one course at the moment. English101. In my English101 project I have tasks that pertain to the entire class… Present Lecture1, Present Lecture2, Update Attendance, Present Lecture3, etc.

Ok so here comes my complicated part… for every single student in my 100 person class, they have to submit to me an essay. This could happen at ANY time within the semester (aka project), and then I have to send it back with my notes and a grade. I read this as two tasks from each student: “Received Student1’s Essay” and “Send back graded Student1’s essay.” Now obviously I don’t want 200 tasks just hanging around in my project until slowly each student sends in a paper and I send it back. This would be crazy, especially if there’s multiple papers or many tasks per individual student.

How would you go about using Asana to solve this problem? I guess I’m just having a major problem when it comes to creating projects that address the entire group as a whole, while also managing tiny little tasks that revolve around my individual group members (students) and what I need to do with them individually since their mini tasks are unpredictable.

Hopefully someone already has a use case like mine, or has any sorts of ideas.

Thanks!

2

Hi Elaine,

Asana is task centric so using it you will end up having 200 tasks for your students. From my perspetive Asana is handy to handle tons of tasks, we have thousands here.

Personally I would potentially create one task per student including the name and maybe a number to identify them. The steps you mentioned could be created as sub tasks with that task. Asana allows to create template tasks. So you would not need to create the sub tasks over and over again but copy it from the template.

Hope this helps,

Patrick
Asana Solutions Partner

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You don’t have to have the tasks in the project, they can be “in Asana”, not attached to any project, but clearly identified with a name structure and maybe a tag. This way, it does not clutter your project but they are still searchable.

Bastien - Asana Certified Pro
Delegate tasks to a virtual assistant :computer:

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One thing I’ve done in a few situations, is great 2 related Projects, in order to segment it. So if I understand your hypothetical situation, you could create a Project called “Eng101 General” and “Eng101 Essays” (or whatever makes sense). I try hard to avoid doing this, but there are times it does make sense for us and is helpful. It would allow you to use the Eng101 General Project for all of your stuff - random things, tiny tasks, stuff more for you… and then the Eng101 Essays could have all 100 Tasks related to each student.

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