Groups and Groupings

Groups and Groupings allow you to create collections of students and staff to create tutorial groups or to enable students to work together in activities.

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What is a Group?

A group is a collection of users enrolled in the unit. This is typically either a whole tutorial group consisting of students and their lecturer, or a selection of users working on a group activity.

Using groups enables you to create a single instance of an activity (such as a Forum) and allow students to interact with only the members of their group, meaning you do not have to create a different activity for each different group of students.

What is a Grouping?

A Grouping is a collection of groups. By using groupings, you are able to restrict an activity to only groups that exist within that grouping.

To use groupings, first make your groups, then create your groupings. You can then add groups to the groupings, then edit your activity settings to be available to only that grouping.

How can I use Groups and Groupings?

See the sections below that explain how you can use groups and groupings functions to:

Apply group settings to activities and units

Use groups and grouping for group work activities

Use groups and groupings for tutorial groups

Restrict access to activities and resources based on groups and groupings

How to apply group and grouping settings to activities

Settings that affect the way groups and groupings are used in a unit can be set at both the activity level and the unit level.

Activity-level group settings

These settings can be applied to a single activity in the unit to determine how groups are used in the activity (if they are relevant to the activity type).

In the settings for an activity (such as a Forum), the Common module settings section includes two settings for groups and groupings:

The Group mode setting determines how groups are used for the activity:

Separate groups - students are able to view, contribute or participate only with other members of their group.
Visible groups - students are able to view other groups' work, but may only contribute or participate with other members of their group.
No groups - groups are not used for this activity (all students may interact with each other).

Setting the Group mode to "Separate" or "Visible" groups also allows staff to filter by groups when viewing the activity for the purposes of marking and review. This is highly recommended if tutorial groups are being used to group staff and students together.

The Grouping setting can be used to allow all groups in the unit access to the activity OR restrict it only users in a group in the chosen grouping:

None - all unit groups, regardless of groupings, may interact with this activity.
Grouping Name - choose the name of a grouping you've created in this unit. Only members in groups that exist in the chosen grouping can interact with this activity, and only the groups in this grouping will appear in the groups filter.

Unit-level group settings

These settings apply to your whole unit and determine the default or overridden group settings for activities within your unit.

For more information, please see LEO Guides: How to set default unit group settings.

Example of use: Group work

A common use of groups in a LEO unit is for group work.

Creating groups for group work

For example, if you had 20 students and wanted them to work on a task in groups of five, you could create four groups of five students:

Use the Create group function to make four groups:
Then, use the Add/remove users function to add five members to each group.
In the settings for the LEO activity in which the groups will be working, such as in a Forum, set the Group mode setting to "Separate groups":

When students use Forum activity with Separate groups mode, they will only be able to see and respond to posts made by members of their group.

Please see LEO Guides: How to create Groups for instructions on how to create groups and add members.

Using groups also allows students to submit in groups using the Assignment activity. For more information, please see LEO Guides: How to set up a group assignment.

Creating a grouping for an activity

You may wish to take this one step further by adding these groups to a grouping. If, for example, these four groups are only relevant to this activity, and have no bearing over students interacting with any other activities in the unit, you can add them to a grouping:

Use the Create grouping function to create a grouping.
Use the Add/remove groups function to add your groups to this grouping:
Modify the Grouping setting of the activity to use the grouping you created:

Now, this activity will only use the groups that are part of this grouping. Other groups in the unit (for other group work tasks, overall tutorial groups, etc.) that are not in this grouping will not appear this activity. Additionally, students who are not part of one of the groups in this grouping will be unable to interact with it.

Please see LEO Guides: How to create Groupings for instructions on how to create groupings and add groups to them.

Example of use: Tutorial groups

Creating groups for tutorials

Another common usage of groups in units is for creating and managing tutorial groups. For example, if there are several lecturers in a unit that will be teaching to different groups of students, you can create a group for each tutorial and add the students and staff to their relevant group:

Use the Create group function to make the required number of tutorial groups:
Then, use the Add/remove users function to add the required students and staff members to each group.
Then, in the settings for unit activities, you can set the Group mode setting to "Separate groups":

By using this group mode, students and staff will only be able to interact with other members of their group.

Please see LEO Guides: How to create Groups for instructions on how to create groups and add members.

Tutorial groups for marking purposes

Tutorial groups as described above can be used to restrict marking activities to only the students relevant to specific tutors. For example, if an Assignment activity is being used by all students in a unit, but you only want lecturers to view and mark their own students' submissions, the activity Group mode can be set to "Separate groups":

When staff in the unit with the Lecturer role access the activity to mark submissions, they will be able to see only the submissions of students in their groups, and can filter this list of submissions based on the groups they are a part of:

Separate groups filter showing tutorial groups 3 and 4

Note: staff enrolled in the unit with the Editing Lecturer role will be able to filter for all groups in the unit that are relevant to this activity. To restrict staff from viewing groups that are not their own, they must be enrolled with the Lecturer role instead.

Creating groupings for lecturers

You may wish to take groups one step further by adding groups to groupings. If, for example, two of these four groups are being taught by the same lecturer, you can create a grouping for that lecturer and add their groups to it:

Use the Create grouping function to create a grouping.
Use the Add/remove groups function to add the required groups to this grouping:
If necessary, you can set the Grouping setting for an activity to be specific to your new grouping:

By choosing this Grouping setting, this activity will only be available to the tutorial groups that are part of this grouping. You may also use this grouping to restrict access to other resources and activities in the unit to only the groups in this grouping.

Please see LEO Guides: How to create Groupings for instructions on how to create groupings and add groups to them.

Example of use: Restricting access to activities and resources

Another key function of groups is the ability to add restrictions to activities and resources.

Any activity or resource in a unit can have a restriction applied to it, and this includes the option to restrict a user's ability to see or interact with an activity or resource depending on their group or grouping.

Some of the ways that group restrictions are often used include:

Making a learning activity only accessible to members of a certain group or grouping.
Hiding resources (such as PDFs or Word documents) from specific groups of users.
Restricting whole sections of a unit to specific student cohorts.

For more information on restriction, please see LEO Guides: How to restrict access using Groups.