The following article details creating and managing groups.
Please note that the course layout, steps, and screenshots shown below may differ slightly for your campus.
To utilize groups in a Brightspace course, a new group category must be created. The group category acts like a ‘group’ for groups and lets you adjust settings for all groups at once.
Creating a group category
Navigate to the Groups tool to begin. If this is not on your course navbar, you can find it under “Course Admin”. Once there, click the New Category button.
- Category Name – A name should be entered for the entire category, which will be the display name whenever you need to interact with the category as a whole rather than a specific group.
- Description – The description field here will show on the category when you view the Groups tool and can be used for organizational purposes, or a later option can be used (read below) to let other users with access to the Groups tool read the description.
- Enrollment type determines the number and enrollment steps for groups. Changing the selection here will affect what the field right below the dropdown does as well. These are the options:
- # of Groups, No Auto Enrollment – creates a set number (#) of groups that must have their students manually placed into
- Groups of # -- creates a number of groups based off a target enrollment number (#) and your course’s roster, divided as evenly as possible with no remainder.
- # of Groups – creates a set number (#) of groups but sorts students into each of the groups as evenly as possible
- Groups of #, Self Enrollment – creates a number of groups based off target enrollment number (#) and your course’s roster that requires students to enroll themselves in their own group
- # of Groups, Self Enrollment – creates a set number (#) of groups but requires students to enroll themselves in one of those groups
- # of Groups, Capacity of #, Self Enrollment – a combination of the two previous options that creates a set number of groups but also limits how many users can enroll in a specific group before registration closes
- Single user, member-specific groups – generates a solo group for each student in your course
- Group Prefix is optional and lets you replace the naming convention of “Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, etc..” with your own starting word instead of “Group”.
- When you are done, click Save at the bottom and Brightspace will begin creating the groups and (if auto-enrollment is enabled) enroll users. This process may take a moment.
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Advanced Properties and Additional Options
The first setting, "Make category and group descriptions visible to group members," is visible for all group types and shows these fields to users who have access to the Groups tool. Otherwise, these fields are not shown to students.
- Two options will only show if an auto-enrollment option was selected above:
- Auto-enroll new users – If any users are added to your course after the groups have been created, these users will be automatically placed in the group with the lowest number of members.
- Randomize users in groups – Without this option selected, users will be added based on the order they appear in the classlist by auto-enrollment. With this option selected, auto-enrollment will randomize the students before assigning them to groups.
- Two options will only show if a self enrollment option was selected above:
- Set Self Enrollment Start/End Date – setting these creates an availability window for students to enroll in a group before registration closes on the End Date.
- Allocate unenrolled users after Self Enrollment Expiry Date – if a student does not belong to a group when the End Date arrives, they are randomly assigned a group without respect to number of members in groups.
Note: Self enrollment and group lockers require a link to the Groups tool in order for students to access these pages. Students can usually find Groups directly on the navbar or in Course Tools, with the location varying by campus.
- Under Additional options, there are three optional components that can be turned on for groups:
- Set up discussion areas – creates a new group-restricted topic. After saving the category, you will be asked whether to have separate topics for each group, or one topic with groups separated by thread instead. The discussion shows up in the regular discussion list along with any regular discussion topics.
- Set up lockers – creates an area for file sharing within a group. In order to utilize this, the users will need access to the Groups tool to be able to find their locker. File size is limited and that limit is visible within the locker.
- Set up assignments – creates a group submission assignment. After saving the category, you will be prompted with the assignment setup, which should have the same setup options as a normal new assignment.
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Enrolling users manually
- Aside from automatic or self-enrollment, there are two ways to manually enroll users into groups. Clicking on a specific group name and then clicking the Enroll Users button at the top of the screen will let you select students for that specific group. If you need to enroll in multiple groups, the other option is to select the dropdown arrow next to the group category and click the Enroll Users option here. This will bring up a matrix where you can assign students to one or more groups all from the same screen.
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