Create group work areas for users with the Groups tool. You can use groups to organize users’ work on projects and assignments, or you can create special work areas for users with different learning needs.
Users can belong to multiple groups within the same course. For example, each user can simultaneously belong to a group for class projects, a group for special interest discussions, and a group for advanced users. Each group can have its own discussion forums, assignments, and locker area to work in. You can grade members of groups individually or as a team.
Users enrolled into a group can see all previously submitted assignments, discussion posts, and locker areas associated to that group. This is the case even if they were enrolled into the group after those items were created.
Video: Use Discussions for Journaling
Best practices for setting up groups
- Groups have a maximum enrollment of 200 users. If there are more than 200 users in a course, you can create new group categories; there is no limit on the number of group categories in a course.
- If you want users to see all users and content for a course but be a part of a group for a specific project or activity, use the Groups tool. However, if you want users to only see learning materials and users from their own section, use the Sections tool.
- To organize users' work on projects and assignments or to create special work areas for users with different learning needs, use the Groups tool.
- Users can belong to multiple groups within the same course, but cannot self-enroll in more than one group. Instructors can add users to other groups at any time.
- For each group, create separate discussion forums, assignments, and Locker areas to work in.
- Grade members of groups individually or as a team.
- Before setting up groups, know how you want to organize them. The following factors can affect how users enroll in groups:
- Setting groups up before or after you've enrolled users.
- Enabling auto-enrollment in groups.
- Enabling randomization of users in groups.
- Enabling self-enrollment in groups.
- The Enrollment Type you choose.
- Set up groups after the majority of users enroll in your course. This gives you a better idea of how many users you are organizing and how many groups you need. Setting up groups after enrollment can also ensure better distribution of users between groups.
- For users to enroll in groups automatically, the Can be auto enrolled into groups permission must be enabled. Contact your site administrator if you experience difficulties.
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For copying any number of groups, you can use the Copy Courses workflow. The asynchronous creation executes behind the scenes and doesn't block other course copy items from completing. You can check your group creation status in the Groups tool. The copy history log reports that the group creation process has started. The completion status is notified via an update alert.
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When you create a new group category via API, you will get a 202 Accepted response code that indicates your request was submitted and is currently being processed. Any API that acts against the group category while it's processing will give a 409 Conflict status to indicate that the action cannot be completed because the group category is not finished processing.