In our drop-in sessions and one-to-one meetings recently, members of the E-Learning Unit have often found themselves discussing various issues around using groups on QMplus. Groups are a powerful feature which, once set up, can provide lots of useful functionality. This feature focus article provides an overview of groups on QMplus, including how you can set them up and highlights just a few of the useful things you can do with them.

Overview

Groups are a way of organising the participants on your QMplus course area. Most usually, groups are used to organise students but you can set up groups for any of the people enrolled on your QMplus area. Once you have people in groups, you can use these in a variety of ways:

Restricting access to content or activities by group

If you only want a particular group to be able to access a resource, such as a file, you can use the restrict access settings on the file. You can also restrict access to entire topic sections in your QMplus area. Do you teach students on two different modules in the same QMplus area? Use groups to organise them and ensure the students only see the activities and resources relevant to them.

Simplifying administrative tasks

There are many ways in which groups can be used to help with administrative tasks. Setting the group mode on an assignment means that you can filter the assignment submission list by group. This can make life much easier if you have large numbers of students or if you have different members of the teaching team marking different groups. Do you need to allow different groups to take a quiz at different times? You can use the group override feature to do this without having to set up two quizzes. You can use the Quickmail tool in your QMplus area to send targetted emails to different groups.

Setting up group activities

Some activities have also been designed with group work in mind. You can set up group forums, wikis or blogs which allow students to work and communicate with the other members of their group. You can set up an assignment to allow students to submit a group report instead of an individual one. The workshop activity with groups enabled allows you to set up a peer assessment activity where students assess and are assessed by their peers in their groups. How an activity behaves with group mode turned on depends on the activity type. Some activities, such as the glossary, do not support a group mode at all.

Setting groups up

There are a variety of ways in which you can set groups up.

Manually

For each group, select the people you want to be in that group from the list of people enrolled on your QMplus area. This method is fine is you only need to assign a small number of people to groups.

Automatically

You can get QMplus to set groups up automatically, either by the number of people you want in the groups or by the number of groups that you want. QMplus will then randomly allocate people to groups.

Spreadsheet upload

You can create a spreadsheet containing the usernames/emails of users and the group(s) they should be allocated to. This can then be uploaded to QMplus to create an populate your groups. This is a useful method to use if you have large numbers of users to allocate or you have downloaded group information from another system.

Self-selection

You can use the group choice activity on QMplus to allow people to select their own groups. You can set up the activity so that each group can have a maximum number of members and you can decide whether you want people to be able to see who is already in the group before they make their choice.

What about groupings?

For those of you who have looked more closely at QMplus groups, you may be wondering about groupings. Groupings are groups of groups. This might sound a bit strange but groupings become very useful if you have different types of groups in your QMplus area and you sometimes need to treat those groups differently.

Imagine you are teaching on a module where students are divided into lab groups and project groups. You use the lab groups to ensure that students are assigned to the appropriate lab and can access the materials that they need for their specific lab. You also set up an assignment for students to submit their lab reports to and your teaching assistants then mark the submissions for the students in their lab. For the project groups you set up group blogs to allow them to keep a project diary and then you set up a group assignment which each group submits their final project report to.

In this scenario, as well as setting up the groups, you would also need to set up two groupings. A lab grouping which contained all the lab groups and a project grouping which contained all the project groups. Now when you set the group mode on an activity, you can indicate which set of groups you wish to use. e.g. the group blog would be set up to use groups from the Project grouping, the lab reports assignment would be set up to use groups from the lab grouping.

Next steps

You will find guides on the topics covered in our Help & Support section. If you want help with setting things up, pop along to a drop-in session on a Tuesday or a Thursday lunchtime.