Group Management

Groups

The Groups feature allows a teacher to assign teachers and students to one or more groups within a course. This will allow the teacher to create separation of students in the course or in one or more specific activities.

Groups must be enabled in the course settings. After it is enabled a group icon will appear in the Course administration block. The icon links to the “Features Groups” page.

Create group

To create a group, click on the “Create group” button below the left column. Type the group name in the text box, a description. If you define a group enrolment key then, not only will entering that key let the user into the course, but it will also automatically make them a member of this group (For this to work you will need to define a separate course enrolment key in your ‘course settings’). You can also define an icon for the group by uploading an image – this icon will appear on the participants listing, forum posts by those group members and other places. The “Save” button will take you back to the Features Groups page.

To add a member(s) to a group you need to select the group name in the left column, then select the participants (use shift or ctrl for multiple selections), from the right column. Click the “Add” button to move them to the selected group..

To remove participants from a group, select the appropriate group to view members, select the participants to remove and click the “Remove selected members” button.

In Moodle 1.9 onwards, groups include the following additional features:

• Groupings tab, an option of creating groups of groups
• Overview tab

In Moodle 1.9 onwards, the groups overview page provides a table listing groups, group members and a user count.

The table may be filtered to display particular groupings or groups.

To access to groups overview page:

1. Follow the groups link in the course administration block.
2. Click the overview tab

• Auto-create groups button

In Moodle 1.9 onwards, groups can be created automatically, with members being allocated randomly or alphabetically according to their first or last name.

Specify and Group/Member count (x) specifies if you would like to create x number of Groups or have each group contain x number of students (when selecting Members per group the Prevent last small group will allocate additional members to an existing group rather then create a new group with fewer members than x.

A naming scheme can also be created automatically. e.g. Group @ will create group with a naming scheme Group A, Group B, Group C, etc and Group # will create group with a naming scheme Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, etc.

Create in grouping and Grouping name allows you to create a new grouping and allocate the groups to be created to it.

Group modes

The group mode can be defined at two levels:

• Course level – the group mode defined at the course level is the default mode for all activities defined within that course. This is determined in the course settings

• Activity level – each activity that supports groups can also have its own group mode defined. If the course setting “Force group mode” is set to “Yes” then the option to define the group mode for individual activities is not available i.e. there is no Groups icon next to activities on the course page.

There are three group modes:

No groups

There are no sub groups, everyone is part of one big community.

Separate groups

Each group can only see their own group, others are invisible.

Visible groups

Each group works in their own group, but can also see other groups. (The other groups’ work is read-only.)

Groupings

In Moodle 1.9 onwards, groups may be organised into groupings. In a nutshell, groupings are clusters of groups.

Enabling the use of groupings

To use groupings, the feature must be enabled on the site by checking the enablegroupings box in Administration > Miscellaneous > Experimental. A groupings tab will appear on the Groups page.

Adding groups to a grouping

To add groups to a grouping:

1. Follow the groups icon in the course administration block.
2. Click the groupings tab on the groups page.
3. If necessary, create a new grouping by clicking the “Create grouping” button on the groupings page.
4. Click the “Show groups in grouping” people icon in the edit column opposite the grouping which groups are to be added to.
5. On the add/remove groups page, select the group(s) you want to add to the grouping from the “Potential members” list.
6. Click the arrow button that points towards the “Existing members” list.
7. Click the “Back to groupings” button. The group(s) you added to the grouping will now be listed in the table on the groupings page.

Existing groupings can be edited and/or deleted using the appropriate icons in the edit column of the table on the groupings page.

Setting the default grouping

Once some groupings have been created, a default grouping for course activities and resources may be set.

1. Follow the settings link in the course administration block.
2. In the groups section in the course settings, select the default grouping.

Assigning an activity to a grouping

To assign an activity to a particular grouping:

1. On the edit activity page, click the “Show advanced” button in the common module settings section.
2. Ensure that the group mode is set to separate or visible groups.
3. Select the grouping from the grouping dropdown menu.
4. Click the “Save changes” button at the bottom of the page.

The name of the grouping will then appear in brackets after the activity name on the course page.

A count of activities assigned to each grouping is kept on the groupings page.

To assign an activity to a particular grouping ONLY, in addition to the above, before clicking the the “Save changes” button, check the “Available for group members only” checkbox. This will result in only users assigned to the groups within the grouping being able to see the activity (or resource) on the course page.

Note: If a graded activity is assigned to a particular grouping only, it will still appear in the gradebook for all users.

Note: You cannot make an activity visible to only one group of students without first placing them into a Grouping. (See What is the difference between groups and groupings? for further details.)

Examples of groupings

1. One metaphor that has worked well in training is this: At the Olympics, there are many sports—gymnastics, swimming, track—and many countries. In this way, there are two levels of being categorized as an Olympian: by your sport, and by your nationality. To be on the United States Olympic Team, you must first be a swimmer, a gymnast, a runner, etc.; you cannot be on the US Team without first being an athlete in a certain sport. Your sport is your group. Your country is your grouping. You must belong to a group before joining a grouping. Does this make sense?
2. An educational example would be that perhaps in a class, you’ve divided your students into 4 groups, each with their own author to research. Groups A and B, while they have different authors, are both assigned to write in a forum; groups C and D, though writing on different authors, are supposed to make a wiki. You might create a Forum Grouping, containing groups A and B, and a Wiki Grouping, containing groups C and D. Then, you can make the Wiki activity available to only the Wiki grouping, but you still have your two Wiki sub-groups, as well – C and D – for an added layer of distinction between the work going on about two different authors.
3. Teachers in different departments might tell some students to enroll in a refresher math course. These student might be assigned to a group associated with their primary teacher. However, each department has a math tutor. The groups that came from a department could be placed in groupings.