Faculty Documentation: Best Practices for Creating Groups

Creating Groups Overview

Creating Groups is a way for instructors to customize their course to give students the ability to communicate and have their own space on the site for working on assignments and projects together in their assigned groups.

Recommendations for Creating Groups

Tip #1: Use generic naming conventions.  The names group names are site visible and should not reflect a status or identifiable name.

Tip#2: You can select more than one name at once by using SHIFT+Click for consecutive names. Use CTRL +Click to select more than one non-consecutive name.   

Tip #3: You can "click + drag" up or down the site member list to select more than one name.

Creating a New Group

  1. First, go to the Site Info tool in your course site. 

  2. Click  on the top of the page.

  3. You will now want to click on  to begin the creation process.

An image of the order the order of the steps faculty will need to follow to create groups

 

Creating a Joinable Group

  1. Access the Site Info tool.

  2. Click  "Manage Groups" tab at the top of the page.

  3. Click on  "Create New Joinable Set"  This is an image displaying the tab that says "Create new joinable site"  which will bring you to the following image:

AN image that diisplays the many screen options.

RECOMMENDATION: Joinable groups allow students to pick their own groups. Given this, it would be best to select the following options, "Allow user to see group membership before joining" and "Allow members to see the other members of these groups after joining.”  

 

How Students Join a Group

1. Students will go to their Site Info tool.

2. Students will see a drop-down menu entitled "Groups you can join". Each student will choose one group to join. 

An image of the list of available groups

 

3. Once the students have joined groups they will see an image similar to this:

  An image of the groups listed with membership

 

4. If the instructor has allowed the students to view who is in each group, each student can click on Membership to view the list of names and email addresses associated with everyone who has already joined the group.