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This page provides information on different use cases for the 'groups' feature with students.

Instructors can create groups for students to collaborate on group assignments, pages, collaborations, and more. Instructors can also allow students to create their own groups.

Within Groups, instructors can:

- View all activity within all the groups within their course, including groups created by students as noted in the instructor's Student Groups tab (by default students will be allowed to create their own groups as noted in the Course Details tab)
- View all created groups within the course
- 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
- Expand and collapse subgroups
- Move students into different subgroups
- Create group collaborations

Naming Groups

We recommend that you add the module code to the group name, as the method students use to access groups quickly identifies all their group enrollments across all modules - see below.

Interactions within the Group

An instructor can view all activity within all groups, whereas students will only interact in their assigned group.

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When students are put in a group, Canvas activates a new icon on their navigation bar. This acts as a shortcut to all groups they are enrolled in across all modules/courses. Within this group, students have access to a 'mini-course' within the module, in which they can send announcements to one another, create discussion boards and collaborate on shared documents.

Resources available for students to learn more about the group space on Canvas can be found in the Student Introduction to Canvas Course, under the 'Groups' module, which begins with the Groups Itinerary Page, found at this link.

In the video below, find a brief walkthrough of what an instructor can do with a group and how the group interface functions from the student perspective.

Creating Groups

Please visit this Canvas Community Page on Groups for a step-by-step walkthrough on the process of creating a manual group set and adding the groups there. Find below a video walkthrough on Groups for Instructors.

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Groups can also be created via excel sheet upload - it may be useful to do this if assigning groups determined by their course instance, or if they have signed up for a particular tutorial.

In the video below, find a walkthrough of how to export the gradebook to use the course instance code as a method of assigning groups via the 'import' option.

Groups in the Gradebook

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Groups can be used as a filter in the gradebook - each marker can then select whichever group they are assigned to mark and the gradebook will show only those students and their assignments.

In the video below, find a short demo of the filter by group feature in the gradebook.