That's a testament to the OneNote team at Microsoft for getting it right in the initial design and updates created for Class Notebook. While OneNote itself has been around for over almost fifteen years, Class Notebook is still a fairly new application. The team at Microsoft have been very receptive to accepting input and ideas from real-life classroom teachers, and as it continues to develop, we as consumers will continue to experience thoughtful additions to its feature set. With that being said, like anything in life, and especially at work, nothing is without some imperfections.
As a high school teacher, I teach several different classes of the same prep. They all follow the same curriculum and syllabus. For me, it makes more sense to put all of those students from different class periods together in one Class Notebook. Many other teachers do the same thing. By default, Class Notebook will organize everyone in your class notebook alphabetically, which is last name first, unless your IT folks set up student accounts differently than the norm. As such, it can sometimes be inconvenient to sort through student sections, like when using the Review Student Work feature of the Class Notebook ribbon, because everyone is mixed in with everyone else.
The Fix:
All you have to do is rename each student in the notebook, adding a number before the names that corresponds with the class period each student is in. After doing so, all of your students will still be arranged in alphabetical order, but now within separate classes that are listed in numerical order. All of your first period students of Class X are listed together, and all the 2nd period students of Class X are listed together, and so on...
(Applause and cheers in the background...)
Yes, this takes a little time to accomplish. No, the pane that lists all your students can not be pinned and therefore requires you to click it to expand open after each time you change a name. Still, the order it creates is worth all that clicking. Hopefully this is something the OneNote team can address in future updates to simplify the process. And don't worry--this does not affect the students' login credentials or mess up any soft of data syncing. You are only changing the appearance of names in your notebook. You are not messing with or affecting actual student account elements.