Using groups in Canvas is a great way of organising students into cohorts outside of the enrolled Lecture/ Tutorial/ Lab sections. There are different options for creating groups:
- Allow self-sign up in a defined number of groups
- Automatically assign students to a defined number of groups
- Manually create groups and randomly assign students
- Manually create groups and manually assign students
For students to be organised into groups within the same section, either enable Canvas to automatically allocate the students or manually create the groups by selecting and dragging students one by one. Requiring group members to be in the same section in self-sign up groups will NOT work as most courses have one main lecture stream in which all students are enrolled.
For students to be added to more than one group, you will need to create and manage multiple Group sets. If this is something you need to set up, contact the Canvas Facilitators Team via the IT Portal.
Read more on Canvas at the University of Auckland, Resources:
- How do students access their groups?
- Use of Canvas groups to support student engagement and collaboration
Read more on Canvas Community:
- How do I view all groups in a course?
- How do I add a group set in a course?
- 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 in a group set?
- How do I automatically assign students to groups?
- How do I manually assign students to groups?
- How do I message students who have not signed up for a self sign-up group?
- How do I prevent students from switching groups in self sign-up groups?