Group Manager

The Group Manager tool allows you to group members in your course. NOTE: The term "members" refers to users that are enrolled in your course in any of these five roles: Section Designer, Section Instructor, Teaching Assistant, Student, and Auditor.

Depending on the design of your course, groups may have been created for you or you can create groups yourself. To access the Group Manager:

• You must have Section Instructor or Teaching Assistant privileges.
• From the Teach tab, click the  Group Manager on the Instructor Tools menu:

There are three options for creating groups in Group Manager:

• Create custom group: creates one group in which you select the members to add
• Create multiple groups: either 1) creates one or more empty groups to which you add members later or 2) creates one or more full groups in which Students are randomly distributed
• Create groups with sign-up sheets: creates one or more empty groups that Students sign up for by using a sign-up sheet that they access from the Course Content tool.

Once the groups are created, you can do the following:

• In Group Manager, you can:
  • add and remove group members.
  • create discussion topics for groups, in which group members can read and post messages.
  • create chat or whiteboard rooms for groups, in which group members can communicate in real time.
  • send mail messages to all members of one or more groups.
  • edit group settings, such as group name and description.
  • edit sign-up sheet settings, such as sign-up sheet title, instructions, and location.
  • delete groups.
• In Assignments, you can:
  • create assignments that can be assigned to groups, allowing Students to work collaboratively.
  • create assignments that Students work on individually but for which you provide additional instructions to groups of Students.
• In Selective Release, you can set selective release criteria based on membership within a group.