Groups are a helpful way to organize and manage collective assignments in your course. The following scenarios are ways in which instructors might use groups in their Canvas sites:
- An instructor of a lecture course of 160 students is looking to give students a chance to discuss course readings with their peers outside of class. The instructor splits the course into 20 groups of 8 students, and the 8 students are required to discuss the course readings each week in preparation for the course lectures.
- An instructor of a 25 student course is trying to organize group presentations on five topics related to the course. The instructor has students sign up for topics of their interest, such that five groups of five students each are formed. The instructor then accepts student work via online submission and submits one grade for each of the five groups.
- An instructor wants to give students a place to collaborate on a year-long project for a small group seminar of 15 students. The instructor creates 5 groups of 3 students, and students create group Canvas sites with Canvas Pages, videos and multimedia, and other content to describe their course content.
- An instructor is teaching a course of both undergraduate and graduate students in the same course. The instructor would like to make some content available to the graduate students without granting access to the undergraduate students. The instructor creates two groups (undergraduate vs. graduate) and restricts access of some advanced readings under modules such that they are only available to graduate students.
Groups thus allow instructors to organize the work students complete, grant and restrict access to certain students vs. other students, and provide a space for student to collaborate in a password-protected online environment. Below you will find links to help you set up and use groups within your Canvas course.
For further information on how to do this, see these guides:
- What are student groups?
- How do I view student groups?
- Where do I find the Group sets that I already created?
- How do I create a new group set?
- How do I automatically create groups in a group set?
- How do I manually create groups in a group set?
- How do I create self sign-up groups?
- How do I automatically assign students to groups?
- How do I manually assign students to groups?
Additional information on groups can be found in the “Groups Chapter” of Instructure’s guides.