Manhattan College Knowledge Base

Multiple Group Arrangements in Moodle

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Suppose you have your students working in groups for an assignment, and you have them divided into Groups A, B, and C.  Later in the semester, you want them to complete another group assignment, but you reshuffle the students into Groups 1, 2, and 3.  Each student would then belong to two groups -- a lettered group, and a numbered group.  So when you set up your group assignments, you need to tell Moodle which set of groups to use.  To do this, you'll need to set up Groupings in Moodle.

Groups are sets of students, and groupings are sets of groups, so to use multiple groupings in Moodle, you'll need to:

  1. Create the groups in Moodle
  2. Create the groupings
  3. Set up your group assignments (and forums, if interested) to use the appropriate grouping

Plan to have your students work in groups, and stay in the same groups for the entire class?  You won't need to set up groupings.  Take a look at the Groups in Moodle tutorial.  

Not sure if you'll be using multiple group arrangements, but think there's a chance you might?  Create one set of groups, create a grouping for them, and set up your activities to use that grouping.  It can be very difficult to add a grouping later in the semester, after students start completing group assignments that aren't set up with a grouping.

Create Groups

Create groups according to the Groups in Moodle tutorial.  But don't follow the instructions in that tutorial for setting up assignments and forums.  You'll do that later in this tutorial.

Create Groupings

If you aren't already there, go into the Participants tab in the course menu, and choose Groupings from the drop-down menu.

On the Groupings screen, click the Create grouping button.  Enter a name for your grouping, and click the Save changes button.

The next step is to add the groups to the grouping.  Click the last icon in the groupings Edit column, labelled Show groups in grouping.  On the next screen, choose groups in the Potential members column and add them to the grouping with the Add button.

Setting Up Group Activities

For group assignments, after changing Students submit in groups to "Yes," change Grouping for student groups to the appropriate grouping that you created.

For group assignment and group forums, after changing Group mode to "Separate groups," change Grouping to the appropriate grouping that you created.

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