Digital Education Wiki Spaces
Accessibility — Assessment — CampusPress Guides — Digital Education — Gradescope Guides — Learning Technology Good Practice — Lecture Recording — Mentimeter — Moodle Baseline — Moodle How-Tos — Multimedia — Student Online Learning — Zoom
Groups and Groupings
Why use it?
Groups can be used to manage group activities or to restrict access to course sections, activities and resources to members of a group.
Groupings are collections of Groups within a course. Using groupings allows you to direct tasks at one or more groups in your course, so that they can work together on the tasks.
Grouping example
Your students are divided into four groups: 1, 2, 3, and 4.
You want students to submit an assignment on Odd Numbers or on Even numbers.
You create two groupings:
Odd Numbers: groups 1 and 3
Even Numbers: groups 2 and 4.
You can now create separate activities for the two kinds of groups, or have students work together within their groupings.
Groups
Note: When a student chooses a seminar group or is assigned to one in LSE For You, the group will be created in Moodle and the student will be added to it automatically.
Create a Group
Go to Participants in the course Navigation Menu. Switch from Enrolled users to Groups in the dropdown.
Click the Create group button (scroll down).
Enter a Group name. Optionally, enter a Description to remember what the group was created for.
Tip: Click on the question mark icon next to any setting to display extra help or click on Moodle Guides link at the bottom of each page in Moodle for accessing context-specific documentation.
Click Save changes.
Add or remove users to/from a Group
Select the Group where to add or remove users from, and click the Add/remove users button.
Select the user or users from the left box and click Add or select them from the right box and click Remove.
Groupings
Create a grouping
Go to Participants in the course Navigation Menu. Switch from Enrolled users to Groupings in the dropdown.
Click the Create grouping button.
Tip: Click on the question mark icon next to any setting to display extra help or click on Moodle Guides link at the bottom of each page in Moodle for accessing context-specific documentation.
Enter a Grouping name. Optionally, enter a Description to remember what the grouping was created for.
Click Save changes.
Add or remove Groups to/from a Grouping
Go to Participants in the course Navigation Menu. Switch from Enrolled users to Groupings in the dropdown.
In the Edit column, click the show groups in groupings icon:
Select the group or groups from the Potential members box on the right and click Add or select them from the Existing members box and click Remove.
How to use Groups and Groupings to manage group activities
Once you have created groups within your course, you can set up group activities.
The most common Moodle activities to which groups apply are Forums, Wikis and Assignments.
On the settings page of the chosen activity, scroll down and expand the Common Module settings.
Use Group Mode to enable groups:
Separate: students work in private groups.
Visible groups: members of other groups can view, but not participate in the activity.
In most scenarios, we advise to select Separate Groups.
If your groups are in a Grouping, select it from the Grouping drop-down.
Note: Once saved, the activity is available to each group on the course. You do not need to create the activity multiple times.
Once a group activity is set up, you can filter by groups using the drop-down menu at the top of the activity.
How to restrict access to course sections, activities and resources to a group
On the settings page of a course section, activity or resource, enable the Restrict access setting.
A group restriction can then be added as the criteria. (Group is only one of the ways to restrict access; see https://lse.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MG/pages/747929617 for more details.)
IMPORTANT: Make sure you click on the eye-icon to hide the criteria (the icon will change to a crossed eye). If the eye is not crossed, students outside the group/grouping will see the activity on the Moodle course even though they will not be able to access it.
This is especially important if you restrict access to students with My Adjustments (MAs) so that their identities are hidden (i.e. their names will not appear under the activity from Moodle’s homepage for everyone to see).
If restricting access by group for students with MAs you must also ensure that the group membership visibility setting is set to Hidden. Please note that this must be done when creating the group as the setting cannot be changed if the group has any members.
These pages are created by the LSE Digital Education Team and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License CC BY-SA 4.0