Using Groups to organise your students

Posted on: 3 September 2020 by Strategic Change Communications Team in Canvas at Liverpool

Groups are a great feature in Canvas, enabling students to be divided into smaller collaborative groups where they can discuss content, work together on group projects and give each other support and feedback.

As an Instructor, Groups provide useful opportunities and information to experiment with how you deliver your teaching. You can:

View all activity within the Groups that have been created in your course
Manually or automatically create Groups within a Group Set [more on these below]
Manually or automatically assign students to Groups within the Group Set
Assign ‘Group Leaders’ to Groups
Allow students to ‘sign up’ to Groups of their choice, e.g. allowing them to choose assessment topic
Create, delete or expand ‘subgroups’ – groups within Groups, e.g. for focussed areas of work within a larger team project
Create collaborations between Groups

What will my students see in a Group?

Students can view the list of Groups in the course by clicking on Groups in the left-hand navigation menu. By clicking on this they will see any Groups they’re enrolled in and access a private space for collaborating with their group. Within each Group, they will have access to a Files area to share documents, a discussion area with message boards, targeted announcements which they can send to each other, and a collaborations space to start using Office 365 documents together.

Staff can access any of these Group areas by navigating to the People area of their course and clicking on the 3 dots next to each Group name to ‘Visit Group Homepage’.

What is a Group Set?

A Group Set can be formed when you divide students between multiple groups within one area – within a course, or within one area of a course. It allows you to see all of the Groups within this area on one page, spot anyone not assigned to a Group and easily move students between the Groups.

You can either manually split students between the respective Groups of the Group Set, meaning you distribute individual students to the Groups of your choice, or you can automatically split the students into equal numbers between the Groups. You can also allow students to self sign-up to certain Groups. Again, you can manually or automatically assign Group Leaders.

Please note:

If you have any additional Group assignments, we recommend that you create a new Group Set rather than re-purposing an existing set. That’s because if you move students out of one group and into another one when marking has finished, the student will lose their previous marks.
Canvas can create a limit of 200 Groups in one course. If you instruct it to create more, it will still only create 200 Groups.

Groups, Group assignments and SpeedGrader

You can create a group assignment in Canvas. Canvas uses Group Sets for group assignments. You can assign one assignment to all of the Groups in your Group set, or you can set differing assignments to individual groups in the Set, with differing due dates. Students will only see the assignments set for their Group . Students can submit Google documents, pages and other formats as an assignment.

For information on how to evaluate a Group Assignment via SpeedGrader, please click here.

Keywords: Canvas at Liverpool , Groups.