Understanding Groups

Groups enable students to collaborate in a 'mini' Canvas area. If a student belongs to at least one group, the Groups option will appear on their left-hand global navigation bar, from which they can navigate to their desired group. The purpose of Groups is to enable student collaboration, so everyone in the group has equal permissions and can see everything that has been created in the group homepage.

An introduction to Groups

Groups are self-contained spaces within a course that include many standard Canvas tools such as Announcements, Pages, Files and Discussions. Within a group, all members (including students) have full control of these tools, meaning that they can add announcements, create discussions and pages, and upload files.

Groups exist as a collaborative student-owned space where students can communicate and collaborate on group projects. Tutors should set expectations and codes of behaviour to manage the use of these groups. 

 

Note:

  • There is no publish/unpublish feature for Pages within a group's homepage. Unlike the main Pages tool in the course, Pages in Groups are published and viewable to all in the group as soon as they are created.
  • Similarly, there is no time-release option for pages or files within a group.

 

Creating Groups

Groups are created through the People tool within any Canvas course. On the People tool, select the Groups tab at the top of the screen, then select the + Group set icon. You can then decide whether you want the group to be open to all students or be an invitation-only subset. 

 

 

If you need to create many groups and import and partition large numbers of students, this can be done via the Group Import feature.

Facilities within Groups

Teachers can create groups for students to collaborate on group assignments, pages, collaborations (using Office 365), and more. In their groups, students also have access to the built-in Canvas web-conferencing tool: Conferences.

Note:

  • The way that the Collaborations tool works with Office 365 means that users need to be full Oxford users with access to the University's Nexus Office 365 system – if you are not logged in to Nexus it will prompt you to log in. Therefore, students with external Canvas accounts can only use the Collaborations tool if they have a private Office 365 account and sign in with those credentials.
  • An alternative might be to use the Discussions tool to share ideas (even if they have to download documents to work on them and then upload them again). They may also use the Pages tool in their group to create shared web pages.

 

Potential uses of Groups 

Groups offer a number of different opportunities in the digital classroom. Instructors can use this functionality to:

  • Create groups for students to collaborate on assignments, pages, and more. 
  • Enable student-run study groups.
  • Create a group of just one student to facilitate private interaction between the teacher and individual  student. This can be useful for portfolio assessment or as part of a learning plan, e.g. teacher education. 
  • Set up student groups at the course level for assignments and in-class work.
  • Facilitate term-long projects so that students can communicate and iterate documents together.

 

Additional capabilities

Within Groups, instructors can also:

  • View all group-based activity, including any additional groups created by students.
  • Manually or automatically create groups within a Group Set.
  • Manually or automatically assign students to groups within a Group Set.
  • Assign group leaders to each group.
  • Allow students to sign up for their own groups.
  • Move students into different subgroups.

Refer to further Canvas documentation regarding Groups for teachers Links to an external site..

If you need to assign a large number of students to one or more groups, it is possible to create a .csv file in a specified format and import that into an existing Group Set. Refer to the Canvas documentation How do I import groups in a group set? Links to an external site.