By: Elaine Jones, Product Manager
Introduction
Within Brightspace, our groups tool allows for a maximum of 200 users to be enrolled into a single group within a category. We have heard from many of you through in-person conversations and ideas on our Product Idea Exchange that this limitation is too restrictive, and with increasing class sizes the need to have larger numbers of users in a single group is more important than ever.
We are excited to announce that we are planning to increase the limit to 3000 users per group in our August (20.25.08) release, and that this new limit is applied wherever you choose to complete user enrollments into groups. Please note that this release is subject to change, and any changes to timelines will be communicated via this blog post.
What changes to expect
We are aware that enrollment workflows, such as API routes and Bulk User Management, are currently being used to bypass the 200 user limit for groups that appears in the UI. To ensure that we can successfully support an increase in enrollments per group, this new 3000 limit will be enforced for all enrollment workflows.
Enrollment workflows that bypass current group enrollment limits often have to be completed by Administrators in Brightspace, taking away from an Instructors ability to create the groups they need in their own courses. Increasing these limits will allow for Instructors to create groups with enrollment limits that suit their courses.
Whether completed with APIs, Bulk User Management, or the Groups tool UI - we can ensure that we can continue to provide a Brightspace experience that is performant and reliable, with increased limits that meet your needs.
If you have groups whose enrollments exceed the new limit of 3000 users, those will not be adjusted. However the ability to add users to these groups will be restricted, and the limit enforced regardless of method of enrollment. At this time, we have no plans to adjust limits for sections, so those will continue to function as they do today.
What comes next?
To support this increased enrollment limit we plan to allow for enrollments into groups to be completed with CSV imports, allowing for enrollments and unenrollments to be handled easily. Later improved groups APIs to retrieve paged enrollment data will allow for continued use while maintaining performance as enrollment limits increase.
We are also investigating the need to increase the number of allowed groups per group category, also limited at 200, to evaluate what changes would be necessary to accommodate any future increases. Please keep an eye on our monthly release updates for more information.