Group Choice

Why use it?

This feature is useful for organising students into smaller groups of their own choice for collaborative work.

The Group Choice plugin enables students to enrol themselves in a group within a course, giving them a choice over group selection. Teachers must specify which groups are available for selection and can set limits on the number of students allowed in each group.

Step 1: Create Your Groups

Before adding the Group Choice activity to your Moodle page, you'll need to create the groups that students can choose from. To do this, navigate to the course's Participants Settings: select Participants from the Quick Navigation Menu, then use the dropdown to choose Groups.

Click the Create Group button to add each group you'd like to make available for students to select from. Enter a Group name. Optionally, enter a Description to remember what the group was created for.

Click Save Changes.

Step 2: Add the Group Choice Activity

Turn on edit mode. Scroll to the section where you want the Group Choice activity to appear, then click Add an activity or resource and select Group Choice.

Give the activity a meaningful Name and use the Description to explain what the students will have to do.

Step 3: Add the Groups to Participate in Group Choice

Scroll down to the Groups setting, this is where you select the specific groups or groupings that students can choose from when participating in the activity.

Select one or more groups from the Available Groups list and click the Add Group button to include them for student selection. This allows you to specify which specific groups you want to make available.

If you have a grouping that includes all your desired groups, you can add the entire grouping by selecting it and clicking Add Grouping.

If you want to limit the number of students allowed to chose a group, please see Limit the number of responses allowed in Step 5: Miscellaneous settings.

Step 4: Settings

Use the available settings to customize your activity, such as anonymising the results, limiting the number of students per group, or setting a deadline.

Tip: Click on the question mark icon next to any setting to display extra help or click on Moodle Docs for this page link at the bottom of each page in Moodle for accessing context-specific documentation.

Miscellaneous settings

In Miscellaneous settings you will find a range of settings specific to the Group Choice activity.

Allow enrollment to multiple groups

Check this box if you would like students to select more than one group to participate in.

Max, enrollments

To adjust this setting, you must first enable Allow enrollment to multiple groups. This option allows you to set the maximum number of groups each student can join. If set to 0, students can join an unlimited number of groups.

Publish results

This setting determines if and how students can view the results of group selections:

Do not publish results to students: Results are only visible to teachers; students cannot see the list of group members or the number of participants in each group.
Show results to students after they answer: Once a student selects a group, they can view the results, which may include who else has joined each group, depending on privacy settings.
Show results to students only after the choice is closed: Students will see group results only after the activity’s end date or after the teacher manually closes the choice. This is useful if you want students to choose groups without being influenced by others' choices.
Always show results to students: Results are visible to students at all times, even before they make a selection. This option lets students see the group distribution and availability in real-time.

If you wish to maintain complete group anonymity, please contact eden.digital@lse.ac.uk We can assist in configuring the settings to ensure that participants won’t be able to view their groups within the participant settings.

Privacy of Results

Publish anonymous results: Students will see how many participants are in each group but not individual names.
Publish full results, showing names: Students can view the names of group members, useful for fostering transparency and helping students identify group members for collaboration.

Allow Choice to be Updated

Controls whether students can change their group selection after their initial choice.

Show Column for Unanswered

When enabled, the Show column for unanswered setting adds a column to the View Responses table that indicates how many students have not yet made a selection in the Group Choice activity.

Filter Out Response Data for Users with Expired or Suspended Enrolments

Turn on this setting to ensure inactive suspended students won’t be included in the activity.

Limit the Number of Responses Allowed

By default, this option is disabled. If you enable it, you can control how many students can enrol in each group.

Setting the same limit to all groups

Once you have included all your groups (see Step 3), set the maximum number of students in the General limitation box.

Click Apply to all groups button to apply the changes. You will see the new limit displayed in brackets next to each group.

Different limitations per group

You can apply customized response limits for individual groups in the Groups settings of the activity: scroll to the Groups section in your Group choice activity, select the desired group, and set the limit in the Limit For (GroupName) box under the Selected Group list.

Common module settings

Here you can hide or make hide or unhide the activity.

The Group mode will not affect this activity.

Restrict access

This is an optional setting which enables a defined specific time frame during which students can make their group selections. To set a time frame, tick the option box for Restrict answering to this time period.

Specify the Open date and time to indicate when students can begin making their selections.

Set the Until date and time to define when the group selection will close.

Step 5: View the responses

When you open the activity, you will see a table with the groups. Click on the Show group members button to see a list of students signed up to each group.

Downloading the responses

Click on the View responses button and scroll to the bottom of the page, where you can choose in which format you want to download the results.

Deleting responses

Click on the View responses button and select the student whose response you want to delete and select the action in the With selected dropbox.

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