Hello.
Welcome to IDC canvas. We're going to talk about student groups today. This is a series of webinars on canvas.
And other tools that we have here at Irvine Valley College that you can use as an instructor and we look forward to having you work with these and let us know if there's anything else that we can provide for you.
So,
Why would you set up groups. Groups are set up for several different reasons.
These are we're talking specifically about student groups here. So in Kansas, you can set it up for grading student collaboration. So the students can work together, have their own separate discussions within their groups, etc.
You're going to assign work to a few students, but not to others. This is a really handy feature, depending on how you're working your class and you can have students communicate better in a group than necessarily in the whole class.
So,
When you're going to decide how you want to set up groups, there's a couple of different ways of doing it works. We're going to go over
That you need to think about what are you going to use the groups for as this only for one assignment.
Is it for the whole course is that one type of assignment. What is it that you're going to use that group for
How many groups. Do you want, do you want two people in a group. Do you want five people in a group. Do you not care how large the group is but you only want a few
You want two or three groups or something, how you need to make the determination, how you want that set up.
Then, who do you want to set up the groups. Do you want to manually assign each student
That way you make sure that you get people set up the way you want them set up could also be that when you're setting it up.
You might want to give a different group for each assignment have several different assignments. That's teacher manually setting it up. You can also have Canvas automatically set up the group.
nice part about that is it's completely random. So there's no oh hey teacher you gave me the same person, and I don't like them or something like that. This is completely random by canvas. You don't have any control over it. So it's a really nice feature.
Another possibility is having the students, sign up for the groups themselves so they can see who's in the group. They can choose to join that group if they would like to
Or choose a different group. Now you can also have students actually create their own groups, if you want to. And we'll talk about that as well.
The one thing to be aware of with students signing up for groups is that they can then individually switch groups at their choice. You don't have control over that.
This is for them to do. By the way, under the canvas admin automatically assigning groups. You can drag people around to change groups. If you would like
But
When the students, sign up for it. They're the ones who can choose which groups, they're going to be in, and then change groups at any time. As long as that group is available.
So how do you go into groups.
To get into group, you go to people on the left hand side of your course navigation and then click on groups set
Click on groups and then you can add a group set
When you create a group set for instance I'm calling this one students you have the choices that we were talking about with regard to how you want to set up so self signup you can allow the students to create their own groups or to set up their own
Go into their own group themselves.
You can require groups members to be in the same section or not. You can you say specify how many groups you want
You can limit the groups to a certain number of members each
And then you also have options for leadership, which is kind of off the bottom of the screen at the moment you can side, set it up for the first person to be that leader or a random person to be a leader, if you even want to have leaders in the group for whatever reason.
The next option here is you can split students into a specific into a specific number of groups. This will automatically try to even it out and give again the specific number of groups and the same number of students in each group if at all possible.
The next option there is the require group members to be from the same section. The advantage to that are where that comes in is say you have
What you're teaching multiple sections of the same course and you've had me cross was those sections. You can require all of the group members to be in the same section.
Why is this important
I was working yesterday with a professor who has three sections that are set up for a course one of the two of the sections are face to face.
And in that those sections one meets monday wednesday Monday one meets Tuesday, Thursday.
So she wouldn't want group members to be in two different sections. She wants them all to be in the same section as she's setting it up. So this is how you can require them to be in the same section and have Canvas do that for you. Same thing is available with the allowing self signup
One of the other parts to this.
Once you've set up a group, you can clone the group set. So for this one, especially. It's really nice.
You can just copy that group said to another group said if you'd like. So this was set up maybe for one assignment you can copy it and use that same exact group set for a second assignment. If you would like
The next part is you can create the groups that yourself, create the groups than yourself. Put the students in again yourself as the instructor
This is very nice because now you can determine exactly how many people are in each group who works together well or
Maybe who doesn't work together well and you want to challenge people. However, it is that you as the instructor wanting to do it. This is allowing you to be the instructor and figure out what you want to do.
When you create the groups that yourself. Now, you
It comes up gives you the list of students and on the left and then it open groups. So I haven't created a group yet I've created only a group set
When I click on plus group I get ad group and I type in the group name, I can limit it to a certain number of user members or I can leave it blank, especially if I'm doing the work myself leaving it blank means that I'm the one in control of how many people are in each group.
Once I've created the groups here I've created three groups, it comes up and they're all blank and open for you to put the students in
You literally click on the eight buttons eight blocks to the left of the students name and drag and drop them into the group that you want them to be in, and it will look something like this where you have each of these groups and the different people that are in each of those groups.
You can have it automatically split into groups. And when you do that, it comes up. You say, How many groups.
And it will do that split for you automatically.
From the student perspective when they take a look, they can see what groups they are in. So, this particular student had one automatic signup and one that I had set up all the improved three
And so this student was a is able to see it the way they see it is on the left navigation in their canvas navigation.
There's the two people that it looks like on the left hand side it will say groups for some students not for others just depends on what they have set for their left navigation.
And when they click on that they will see a list of what groups. They are currently in this has nothing to do with your class. This has to do with Canvas. So they could see all of their groups that they're in from all of their classes at the same time.
So,
In having auto sign up. You see how everything is set up in this case.
The next option is having the students. Sign up themselves so
This allows the students to choose their own groups, but there's a couple of different ways of doing it. One you as the teacher can create the group's it's up to you if you want to have it or if you want the student to be looking at to create their own groups.
And by that I mean creating the group structure not creating not putting the people in it because you're having the students do that. So when you've created the structure or you allow the students to create the structure, then
everything will work out for those students based on where they're set up. Remember, students can switch groups if they when they want to. So in order to do this you must make sure that people shows up on the left hand side of the in the course navigation.
If people is in the course navigation people, students can automatically create their own groups. This does not matter if
You have wanted to set up groups or not students can still do it. And once they start setting up the groups, then they can themselves go in and assign themselves to the groups if they would like.
And again, if self sign up as enabled students can switch groups when they wanting
So creating the students. Sign up group.
I clicked to allow self sign up then with the group structure acquit three groups in unlimited the groups to three members each
For leadership, I set it up to automatically assign a student leader as the first student to join the group. So that way, each group when new leader comes in or new group is started by that student there, they become the leader.
From the student perspective when they see that they can go in and join the groups. You see how on the right under the students. Sign up group. There's join
They can also visit the other groups if they want to see it and see if they
If they want to switch groups.
So here under the join they've joined this group. Now they can leave the group, you see that on the right and switch to a different group. They can leave the group and not be in a group at all, or they can leave the group and switch to a second group.
And now that this same student has the signed up for a group, you see that the students sign up. Group one is the one that's in place.
If the students themselves wants to create a group completely on their own. They see they see this when they go into people. And then they click on plus group so they can give a group name. They can either
Choose to have allow members to join whenever they want. Or they can invite specific people at this point, they actually see the list of people, they can click on it and they can send an invitation to those and allows them to work together on a particular project or something like that.
What happens in Canvas. When you have a group. So any of the ways we've just talked about creating groups allows you to
Allows you to have a group, but it's not just about submitting assignments, although that can be all that you use it for. There's a lot more that can go into this. So let's start with
The Group Homepage so as the instructor. When you have your list of groups, you can go to the right and click on visit Group Homepage and you'll see the homepage. Now you can go in and you can edit this. You can put
Us pages and create home pages you can do announcements directly, just to that one group, you can have discussions that are only for that group certain files that are only for that group.
You do not have the ability to change the menu on the left for that group, but you've got a lot of things that you can do in this group and the whole idea here is to have your students working together in a group and have Canvas control that.
So if they go into people. They see the other people that are in the group.
And you can see that at the top there's an option for switching groups. This is again from the teacher standpoint, you can go in and switch so that you can flip very quickly through the different groups that are setup that you have that setup.
When you go in and you create an assignment, for instance, here I've created group one assignment.
I now can make it a group assignment, the check box in front of this is a group assignment. I have two options for how I want to create the assignment one I want to give all the students, the same grade or the other is assigned a great individually.
If you're doing an assignment that you this. That's part of what you're trying to accomplish is to have one grade for multiple students then not having that checked is a really good way of filling
Filling out the grades and getting it. Correct. If, on the other hand, you have a group assignment where maybe somebody's going to work harder than others. You want to give
Some difference in rating based on something like that, then checking the assigned grades to each student individually as a great way to handle that.
You then pick which groups that you want to work with and you can create a new group set or category as they call it on the screen. So that would allow you to do for instance Assignment one group assignment to group. If you wanted to have separate groups for each assignment.
Down below that you have an option for requiring peer reviews peer reviews work with groups, very similar to how they work in discussions or in other assignments.
So you can have it automatically when you do require peer reviews, it will notify everybody who is handed in the assignment. By the time of the peer review that they are to review the specific
Submission by another student and by another group, specifically, so that will help you there. One of the nice things though is you can now assign this to a specific group.
Why do I say that maybe you have a group that is as we talked about before, maybe the group is made up of one section of your class versus another section of your class.
Well, you could do an assigned to based on the section. Maybe this assignment is only for a specific group, for instance.
You may have a presentations and you're wanting to do three different types of presentations. One is a video presentation where the group has to record a video.
Another is an oral presentation in front of the class and the third is just handouts in the class.
And you want to see how each one is handled differently. So you might have different due dates different things like that associated with it.
So you could have group one be video presentations. When you do the video presentations that due date is going to be different than group to who's doing or presentations.
Things like that. So you figure out what makes most sense for you. But this is a really nice thing once you've set up groups. Once you set this as a group assignment. You can then assign it to individual groups, which is a really great feature.
Another nice feature is if you assign it to an individual group now only that group.
Will show up in the gradebook to receive upgrades. So in this case, group one was made up of Brett and Daniel
And so that those are the only two that I can give grades to the rest of the grades are grayed out that those students don't even know that this assignment exists, it's only for the two that are in this particular group.
For more information about groups, please go to Canvas or go to Google, type in groups in Canvas, you'll find out a lot of information, or you can get a lot more information on all topics related to Canvas, through
Call in Canvas.
Through tech that obviously that edu especially for students I VC that edu has a specific distance education area that's got a lot of information about Canvas and about other distance education type
Issues and then you can contact me as a faculty member Tech has got a specific faculty area training that obviously.edu you'll see options for webinars. A lot of different training that we offer.
And as I said before, always take a look at Google, Google's got all kinds of information for you that will help you and help you develop your class learn from other people, stuff like that.
Thank you for watching and I look forward to presenting to you again next week.
Have a great week.