Groups: How to place your students in them

Placing your students into groups in Moodle

 

Introduction.

Encouraging your students to

• Collaborate
• Construct
• Peer review
• Reflect and respond
• Complete small group activities

These are all useful teaching and learning strategies that you would use in a classroom and a  face to face environment. These strategies can easily be transposed into your Moodle course by setting up small groups for your students, especially when you use forums.

Groups help to encourage collaboration eg “Read the MacKay reading above and comment on the three valuable take away messages you got form it”. Small groups stops the lazier students reposting “I agree with what has been said above”. In groups they have to actively contribute and collaborate.

 

Some tutors add group participation to their assessments or activities either as a formative or a summative tool.

Taking this idea to another level you can ask the students individually to reflect on the group members performance,  eg ‘we all contributed equally’. Or ‘ xxxx  didn’t  complete any of the tasks they offered to do. “

 

Lets start.

Open your Moodle course and Turn editing on

Go to the top menu bar up by the url for the course and click Course admin and scroll down to Users and Enrolled users. Enrolled users allows you to see all the students enrolled in your course.  Without students you cant easily set up groups.

Go back to Course admin, Users and click on Groups

This window will appear.

 

You have two choices:

1.      Create groups where you manually nominate the students to go into that particular group. Useful if you have a combined class  or a class heavy in one gender and you want to balance this out

2.      Auto-create groups. This option is really useful and quick

 

 

 

 

 

Auto-create groups

Click on the Auto-create groups

and work through the options

 

Naming scheme. The computer will automatically name your groups - Group A, Group B, Group C. Explore options if you want 1, 2 etc

Auto create based on.  Here you can change to members in each group eg 5, or how many groups you want eg 10

Group count Depending on your choice above will determine how many people in the group, or how many groups.

Scroll down to Prevent last small group and tick the box. This stops one person being in a group on their own and helps to distribute number

Click Submit at the bottom of the page

You can see for this class I have 8 groups with 5 members except Group A has 6 members. (Use of prevent last small group).

 

 

When I click on Group A you will see all the members of that group.

 

When you click and highlight a group there is the option at the bottom of the screen to Add / remove users.  When you click on this option you can override the computer and manipulate the group numbers yourself by adding and removing students.

Click on the name of the student you wish to add or remove and then click the Add or Remove arrow button. Please note you are not removing the student from your course, just from that particular group.

If you use Create groups then you are manually creating your groups one by one and adding the students your self

 

 

 

Click on the group you have created, and then click Add /remove users.   The second window will have all the students in your class and you can select the relevant students by clicking on their name and then clicking the Add arrow button. Or conversely if you wish to remove a student from a group, highlight the particular student and click Remove. Please note you are not removing the student from your course, just from that particular group.

 

Using groups in forums

 If you don’t have a forum set up in a tab in Moodle your course scroll to the bottom of the page you want the forum in. (If you already have a forum created go to the end of this document to Editing existing forums)

Click on Add an activity and scroll down to Forum. Name your forum

Scroll further down the page to Common module settings.  In this setting click on Group mode and choose Separate groups, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save and return to course.

Go back to your course and scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see your forum, in this example called Propagation forum.  And for this exercise I put the students into Propagation groups A - H

Restricting views to groups

As a student in a group they will see….

As a student eg in Group H, you will see an ordinary forum icon. When you click on the forum to add your post or comment inside you will see this. Note this student is in Propagation group H

 

As a tutor you will see: 

As a tutor you will see the Restricted label telling you that there are groups.

 

When you click on your forum eg in this case Propagation forum you go through to this window.

Click in All participants and you will see your separate groups. By clicking in each group, you are able to see the contribution made to that group by the various group members

Editing existing forums

If you have an existing forum you must first, make your groups as above.

Go to your existing forum and click Edit, and Edit settings.

Scroll approx. halfway down the page to Common module settings.  In this setting click on Group mode and choose Separate groups, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click  Save and return to course.