Course Administration | UR Courses: Guides (2024)

You can create groups in your course to use with certain activities and help organize your students.

Why use groups?

You are an instructor in a course where you have several sections and you want to filter your activities and gradebook so you only see one section at a time.
You are an instructor sharing a course with others and you want to filter your activities and gradebook so you don't see the students from your colleagues’ sections.
You want to allocate a particular activity, resource or topic section to just one section or set of students and you don't want others to see it.

Group levels

A group or grouping can be used on two levels:

Course level - The group mode defined at the course level is the default mode for all activities defined within that course. To use groups you need first to set a group mode in 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. If it is set to "No", then the teacher may change the group mode.

Group modes

There are three group modes

Enabling Groups

Group mode can be enabled at the course level to utilize the full potential of group features.

To enable group mode at the Course level

Select Settings from Course navigation
On the course settings page, scroll down to the Groups section.
Within the Groups section, select the Group Mode.
For Force group mode, choose Yes or No. If the group mode is "forced" at a course level, then the course group mode is applied to every activity in that course. Individual group settings in each activity are then ignored. This is useful for setting up a course for a number of completely separate cohorts.
Click Save and display.

To enable group mode within Activities

If a group mode is not selected at the course level, group mode settings can be enabled individually for each activity.

Turn on Edit mode.
Edit an existing resource or activity or create a new one.
Under Common module settings, in the Group mode field, choose No groups, Separate groups or Visible groups.
Click Save and display.

Note: The Group mode can only be used if a group mode was not forced in course settings. See the previous section for more information on Group mode in Settings.

Creating a group

Select Participants from Course navigation and from the dropdown select Groups.
On the resulting page, select Create group.
On the Create group page, add a group name and optional description (displayed above the list of group members on the participants page), enrolment key and picture (displayed on the participants page and next to forum posts)
Select Yes for Group messaging if you wish to engage in group conversations. You will then be able to send group messages from the messaging drawer. Make sure you are in the group as well as your students. See Messaging for more information.
Select Save changes to return to the main Groups page.
Create additional groups as necessary.
Select the group to which you want to add participants, then click the Add/remove users button.
On the resulting page, use the Add button to move users from the Potential members list on the right to the Group Members list on the left. To select multiple users at once, hold the Ctrl key on the keyboard while clicking on the desired users.
Once group members are selected, click Back to groups to see the groups and group members.
Update any other groups as necessary.

An optional group ID number (an advanced setting) may be added for matching the group against external systems. Group ID numbers are not displayed anywhere on the site. Within a course, all group ID numbers must be unique. Thus it's not possible to create a group with a duplicate group ID number.

Auto-create groups

Auto-create groups allows Moodle to create groups either randomly, alphabetically or by ID number when the number of groups or number of students desired for each group is specified.

Select Participants from Course navigation and from the dropdown select Groups.
On the resulting page, select Auto-create group.
On the General section, enter a Naming scheme.

A naming scheme can be created automatically. # is replaced by sequential numbers, and @ by letters. For example:

Group @ will create group with a naming scheme Group A, Group B, Group C . . .Group # will create group with a naming scheme Group 1, Group 2, Group 3 . . .

Select whether to create a specific number of groups or as many groups as necessary to accommodate a specific number of students.
On the Group Members section, the Select members ... allow yous to choose from roles assigned within the course, available cohorts, groups or groupings. Select the appropriated one for your course.
Select how you want to allocate members.
When selecting Members per group, depending on the number of users in the course, the last group can end up with significantly fewer members than expected. You can select Prevent last small group to avoid the situation. If the last group would be smaller than 70% of the expected size, it will not be created. Instead, Moodle will allocate additional members to existing groups rather than create a new group with few members.

Example 1:

You have a course with 80 students and you let auto-create groups with 30 members per group. There would be just 20 students in the third group which is 66% out of expected 30. Moodle will auto-create only two groups with 40 students in each.

Example 2:

You have a course with 81 students and you let auto-create groups with 30 members per group. Moodle will create three groups with 30, 30 and 21 members respectively because 21 is 70% out of expected 30.

The Ignore users in groups checkbox should be ticked to only select group members from users that are NOT already in a group in the course.
The Include only active enrolments checkbox provides the option to choose whether to include suspended users in groups.
On the Grouping section, you can create a new grouping and allocate the new auto-created groups to be created to it, or add them to an existing Grouping.
Press Save.

Prior to creating the groups, you can view the groups.

Groupings

Groupings are most commonly associated with releasing an item (assignment, file) to one person or a small group while hiding from the rest of the participants in the class. Creating a grouping allows the release of specific material to a select number of students, teaching assistants, designers, etc.

In order to understand Groups and Groupings consider, for example, at the Olympics, there are different sports (gymnastics, swimming, track) and many countries. There are two ways to think of an Olympic athlete: by the sport they compete in or by their nationality. To be part of the United States Olympic Team, you must first be a swimmer, a gymnast or a runner. You cannot be in the US Team without first being an athlete in a specific sport. The sport is your group. Your country is your grouping. You must belong to a group before joining a grouping.

Several groupings can be created containing different groups. Use groupings if, for example, there are two sections of a course that will share some documents but should not share exams, assignments, activities or group work.

Select Participants from Course navigation and from the drop down select Groupings.
Click Create Grouping. Give the grouping a name and click Save Grouping.
The grouping will now show up in a list on the main Groupings page.
Press the Groups icon to add a group to the Grouping.
Select a group or groups from the Potential members list and press Add to add them to the Grouping.
Press Back to groupings.

Assigning Groupings to an Activity

Turn Edit mode on.
Edit an existing resource or activity, or create a new one.
Under Common module settings in the Group mode field, ensure that Visible or Separate groups is selected.
In the Grouping field, choose the Grouping.
Click Add group/grouping access restriction to restrict this to a particular Grouping.This activity is now only available to members of the groups that are associated with the chosen grouping. Students not in that grouping will not see the activity on the course page at all.

Restricting an activity, resource or course topic to a particular group

To be able to restrict an activity, resource or course topic to a group, Restrict access must be enabled. This will result in a 'Restrict access' section in the activity, resource or topic settings and a group restriction can then be added.

Groups overview

A overview of groups and groupings is available via the Overview option in Participants > Groups > Overview.

The table may be filtered to display particular groupings or groups and it will also display students who are not in a group.