The Student Groups feature allows you to turn selected course items into group projects! You can create an unlimited number of individually named “group sets” (i.e. Study Groups, Project Groups, etc.) that can contain groups of students, either randomly generated or assigned. These group sets can be attached to individual assignments or discussions in order to convert those assignments or discussions into group projects.
Before you begin, there are two important aspects of this feature that you should know:
All students should be assigned to groups before the assignment is published. Grades and submissions may be affected for students who were not in a group at the time of assignment submission but who were later added to a group.
This feature is only available for Discussion pages and for Assignment pages that do not include an external tool (for instance, the programming environment in Intro to Computer Science).
Creating Randomly Selected Student Group Sets
To add randomized groups to an assignment or discussion, follow these steps:
Go to a given assignment or discussion page and click “Edit” at the top.
Scroll down to the “Group Assignment” area.
Check the box next to the sentence “This is a group assignment.”
Give the group set for this assignment a name.
From here, you can allow students to sign up themselves if you prefer; by default, however, the teacher will have the ability to set up groups.
Determine the group structure and number of groups, and decide whether to create student leader positions yourself or leave that to the students.
Click “Save.”
Normally, group assignments are shared between group members. If you would like to assign grades to each student individually, select the appropriate check box in the Group Assignment area of the assignment or discussion:
Assigning Students to Groups
If you do not want students to decide which group to join, you can assign students to groups within the People page. To set up assigned groups, navigate to the people page in your left-hand menu and follow these steps.
Click the blue “+Group Set” button in the upper right corner.
If you have not already created the group set in the assignment, click the "+ Group Set" button to see the same menu as above; if you have already created the group set, proceed to step three.
Populate your groups by dragging and dropping student names into the group box. You can also use the search field to narrow down the names if you have a large class!
Adjusting Group Sets
After creating the group set, you can adjust the individual groups by either dragging and dropping student names between the groups or by clicking on the three-dot icon on the right end of a student’s name within the group page, then selecting “Move To” and choosing the appropriate group.
