Moodle How-To: Groups

Moodle supports groups within courses – an extremely valuable capability that enables collaboration between students. The Groups feature allows an instructor to assign instructors and students to one or more groups within a course. Instructors can then create separate workspaces for groups of students in the course or in one or more specific activities. Groups can be created at the course level and activity level, as well as made invisible (so users can only see their own groups) or visible (so users can work within their own groups and, with read only access, view other groups as well).

Moodle’s Course Administration has a link to the Groups section, where instructors can create groups. An instructor simply clicks Create Group and is prompted to enter a name and description for the group. The instructor then highlights that group in the list and clicks Add/remove users. This shows the instructor the group list on the left and a list of users that are eligible to be in a group (i.e., users that are enrolled in the course, or users in the site if the course is public) on the right. Instructors can highlight users and click Add to add the user to the group list. When finished, the instructor clicks Back to groups to save and go back to the main Groups page.

Instructors can also create randomized groups by clicking Auto-create groups. This allows the instructor to specify a role from which to choose users, how many groups or members per group, a naming scheme, and whether or not to create the groups in a grouping.

Many activities and resources in Moodle can be made available to only certain groups or groupings (groups of groups)and grades can be viewed separately based on group.

For more info, check out the video below by Chief Architect, Tom Murdock.