Group Management in Canvas
However, groups must be managed and deployed correctly to provide valuable student experiences. These Canvas group management best practices and tips will help you create effective group assignments.
Group Visibility
By default, groups are not visible to students
in our Canvas courses. If you’d like students
to see groups and group sets, you’ll need
to enable the People page in your course
navigation menu.
Launch your course settings and click the
Navigation tab. Click and drag People to the
section above.
Group Sets vs Groups
When working with groups in Canvas, it’s important to understand the difference between a group set and a group. A group set is a collection of groups. It may be useful to think of the group set as the collaborative work in its broadest form. This structure will house all the groups working on the assignment.
To create a group set in Canvas, click People in the course navigation menu and select the blue “+ Group Set” button. After naming the group set, select to let Canvas make the groups randomly or to create them later manually. By default, you’ll see a tab with Everyone. Any group sets that exist in the course will follow. In this course, there are three group sets:
Discussion Groups, Reflective Journal, and Training – Manual Group Example.
Clicking the Discussion Groups tab will display a wealth of information about the group set, including the number and names of groups, the number of students currently within each group, and any students who haven’t yet been assigned to a group. To move unassigned students into a group, click and drag their names into any existing group.
Group Assignment Setup
Whereas a group set is a framework, groups are the component parts of a group set, and students are individual members of each group. This taxonomy is important to remember when setting up group assignments. To deploy an assignment to the correct groups, you’ll need to select certain settings for your group assignment.
Step 1. Ensure that “This is a Group Assignment” is selected.
Step 2. Choose to give everyone in the group the same grade or assign grades
individually to each student. Choosing to assign grades individually allows for
situations like group members dropping the course or an uneven distribution of labor among group members.
Step 3. Select the group set. This ensures the assignment is deployed to all groups within the specified group set.
Group Names
When students are added to groups, an aggregated list of their groups is available from the global navigation menu
in Canvas. This can cause confusion when generic group names, like “Group 1” or “Red Team” are used. Since
more than one course may use these generic group names, students could find a list full of duplicate groups with
no ability to distinguish between them. To avoid this confusing redundancy, add a unique identifier to your group
names. The course ID works well for this purpose.
For support with managing group assignments, reach out to the help desk: [email protected].
