A group is a collection of users in a GauchoSpace course site. As an instructor, you can use groups to allow some students to work together or to restrict activities and resources to specific groups of participants in your course. Also for grading purposes, TAs can sort submitted assignments by sections/groups. Users can belong to multiple groups. Instructors and Editing TAs can create/manage groups from the participants page.
A grouping, on the other hand, is a "group of groups". Sometimes it is useful to organize groups into groupings to help manage users in a course. For example, students may be in one group for a group project and in another group for a weekly discussion. By putting groups into groupings, you can tell certain GauchoSpace activities to recognize only specific groups and ignore others.
This article describes how to create a group, grouping, and set up an Assignment on GauchoSpace where students submit in predefined groups.
Reviewing these basic concepts will help you understand this article:
Activity: Activities are added by instructors for students to submit materials and interact with the instructor or other students. Some examples include Assignments, Quizzes, and Forums. Certain Activities can be graded within GauchoSpace and are automatically populated in the Gradebook.
Assignment: "Assignment" is an activity that enables instructors to collect, grade, and redistribute students’ work. Assignments are intended for one-to-one interaction between students and instructors. Unless students are submitting as a group, they cannot see each others' work. Students can submit many types of digital content (e.g., documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, etc.), type online text directly into GauchoSpace, or be graded on offline assignments outside of GauchoSpace (e.g., presentations, performances, or class participation). Once instructors grade an assignment activity, students can see feedback and grades for their work in the Assignment and the Gradebook.
Forum: "Forum" is an activity where students and teachers can exchange ideas by posting comments. Instructors may allow files to be attached to posts, attached images will be displayed inline. There are five basic forum types within GauchoSpace, the most popular being the standard forum for general use. Forums can also be graded through the Gradebook if you use ratings.
Group: A group is a collection of users in a GauchoSpace course site. Users can belong to multiple groups. Some groups are created automatically in GauchoSpace (such as for discussion sections or labs that are registered under a parent course), whereas other groups can be created manually. Instructors and Editing TAs can create/manage groups from the Participants page.
Grouping: A grouping is a "group of groups". Sometimes it is useful to organize groups into groupings to help manage users in a course. For example, students may be in one group for a group project and in another group for a weekly discussion. By putting groups into groupings, you can tell certain GauchoSpace activities to recognize only specific groups and ignore others.
Group Mode: Group mode determines how students view content in group activities. Separate groups mode will restrict visibility of submitted/posted content to members of a student's own group. Visible groups mode, on the other hand, will allow visibility of submitted/posted content to members of any group.
Groups are either:
- Manually created by the instructor
- Created by GOLD with a designated Teaching Assistant (such as for Discussion Sections or Labs that are registered under the same course meeting)
- Created automatically when two course rosters are merged.
For TA section groups, GauchoSpace will automatically add an assigned TA's name and the date/time/location to a section group based on information in STAR. If a TA is added after the course has been created, they will be assigned to their section and their name will be added to that group. If a TA's name is not listed with the group, you can edit the group name to make that change.
Creating predetermined groups
1. In the Administration block, click Users, then click Groups.
2. Click Create Group.
3. Give the group a name.
4. Click Save Changes.
5. Click Save changes. A message summarizing the changes will appear. Click Continue to return to your Grader report. When you have edited grades linked to an activity within the course, GauchoSpace will highlight the cells in orange to show that the grade has been overridden.
6. Once you have created the appropriate number of groups (steps 1-5), you can populate them with users: In the Groups area, find the group into which you would like to add users, and single-click on that group to highlight it.
7. Click Add/remove users.
8. In the next window, you will see all of the course participants (students, TAs and instructors) in the Potential Members list. Click on a name to highlight it. To select multiple users from the Potential Members list press the CTRL (PC) or the Command (Mac) button on your keyboard as you click each person's name. If a user is already in a group, it will show that in the Selected User's Membership section, to the right of the Potential Members box.
9. Click the Add button to add selected users to the group.
10. Repeat for all groups until you have put every student into a group.
11. To publicly display groups to students, put groups into a grouping and add the Group Member Resource to your page.
Creating random groups
The Auto-Create Group option can be useful for grading purposes and group projects. This will let GauchoSpace randomly sort your students into groups either based off of number of students in each group or number of groups you want to be created
Manually adding users to a group requires two steps: 1) manually creating a group, and 2) subsequently adding users to the group. Randomly adding users to a group, however, collapses these two steps:
1. In the Administration block, click Users, then click Groups.
2. Click Auto-create groups.
3. Define the naming scheme of the group to be named as a letter series or a number series. If "@" is used then groups will be named with the letter suffixes (A,B,C, etc). If "#" is used then groups will with number suffixes (1,2,3...etc).
4. Specify whether you want to create a specific number of groups or whether you want to create groups with specific number of people in it.
5. Specify the actual number of groups or number of people in the group based on what you have selected above
6. Optionally, you can specify if you want members to be selected from a specific grouping only (see groupings section for more details) or selected from a specific group (such as a section group) only. In many cases, TAs might want to create groups within their sections. In such cases, make sure to specify that section group.
7. You can check Prevent Last Small Group so that group will be smaller than the Group/Member count parameter (see step 5, above). For example, with 14 students in a class, you specify you want groups of 4. If this option is unchecked, it will create 3 groups of 4 and one group of 2 students (thus creating uneven-sized groups). But if that option is checked, it will create 2 groups of 5 students and one group of 4, thus creating more even-sized groups.
8. Click Submit.
9. On the next screen you will see your new groups and the members of the groups on the right.
Renaming a group:
1. In the Administration block, click Users, then click Groups.
2. Highlight the group whose name you wish to change.
3. Click Edit group settings.
4. Change the group name as desired.
5. At the bottom of the page, click Save changes.
Note: Section data is updated every few hours from Registrar data; we recommend not changing the name associated with section groups. If a TA is missing from a section, they should be named in STAR which will feed into the group name associated with the section. If the name of a group section is changed, depending on the change, the name will not get updated if there is a change in the registrar. If the name is changed to a format outside of the default section group naming format then it won't update with the next registrar sync, but if it is left in the same format it should revert to the section name in the STAR database.
A grouping is a group of groups. Sometimes it is useful to organize groups into groupings to help manage users in a course. For example, students may be in one group for a group project and in another group for a weekly discussion. By putting groups into groupings, you can tell certain GauchoSpace activities to look only at specific groups and ignore others. Your course may contain groups other than the ones that will be used for the assignment (e.g. groups defining course sections). As a best practice, we recommend that you always configure a grouping containing the groups that you just created for assignment submission.
Here are the two main steps to set up a grouping:
1. In the Administration block, click on Users, then click Groups.
2. Click on the Groupings tab.
3. Click Create grouping.
4. Name the grouping (e.g. "Assignment 1 Grouping").
5. Click Save changes.
Now that you have created the grouping, you would need to add the groups to your grouping. The grouping should only include those manually-created or auto-created groups that are relevant to this specific assignment. To add groups to the grouping, follow these steps:
1. Edit the grouping by clicking the people icon on the right side under edit.
2. Highlight a group you want to add to the grouping and then click “Add.”
3. Once you are done adding all the groups, click on “Back to Groupings."
Step 1: On your course-site, click Turn editing on.
Step 2: Go to the week/section block where you have added your Assignment. To the right, click Edit -> Edit Settings.
Step 3: Navigate to the Group submission settings tab, and set Students submit in groups to Yes. Set Require all group members submit to No, unless you want to enforce the condition that a student necessarily is a part of a group to make a submission. In such a case, users who are not members of a group will be unable to make submissions, and individual students would have to be placed in single-person groups to be allowed to submit.
Step 4: If applicable, change the Grouping for Student Groups setting from None to the name of the appropriate grouping.
Step 5: Navigate to the tab titled Common module settings, set Group mode to Separate Groups.
STEP 6: Again, if applicable, change the Grouping for Student Groups setting to the name of your grouping.
STEP 7: Click Save and display.
If you enable Groups in your forum, then you can restrict which participants are able to view and post to the different discussions that you create within a single forum. For example, you may set up a single forum, but restrict different discussions within the forum to predefined groups, such as your discussion sections. Instructors may post a discussion topic to a selected group only, or post copies of a discussion topic to all groups.
The procedure for setting up a group forum is the same as a standard forum, but with two additional steps:
There are two main styles of group forum: "Visible Groups" and "Separate Groups".
With "Visible groups", students can only start discussions for their own group, but can also see other groups using the "Visible groups" dropdown menu. The other groups' work is read-only. Students can only reply to discussions started by other group members or their instructors if the instructor posts to "All people".
With "Separate groups", students can only see or reply to discussions started by their group members or discussions started by the instructor for their own group. Similarly, students can only start discussions for their own group. As opposed to the "visible groups" option, if a teacher adds a new discussion topic for all participants, students can not reply to it.
To set the visibility:
1.Go into your forum and go to the Forum Administration block. Click Edit settings.
2. Scroll down to the Common module settings section. Set Group mode to either "Visible" or "Separate" groups:
1. In the Forum, click Add a new discussion topic and draft your initial post.
2. Post to a specific group or post copies to all groups.
3. Now, each group will be able to see their copy of the discussion post.
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You can allow students to self-select groups by adding the Group Choice Activity to your page.
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Students who have enrolled in your course after the creation of manual groups will not appear in a group automatically. They must be manually added, as well.
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To display group membership to students, add the Group Member Resource to your page.
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Project groups consisting of individual students should be created as a one-person group, if applicable
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Group mode will not work in “single simple discussion” forums because only one discussion is allowed.