I don't follow how calling this method on a course with no sections returns 500 (although I could be reading the code wrong). It looks to me like if you call the method with a course_instance_id parameter that refers to a course that doesn't exist you will get a 500 (although it might make sense for that to be a 404 or a 403, depending on our security model). If you call it with a valid canvas_course_instance_id you should render the create_section_form page with an empty sections list (ignoring for now the server failure issue that you raised above). Am I missing something?