Assigning Discussions & Assignments to Existing Groups

This page shows examples of how to utilize groups of students once they are created within your course.

An important note on this documentation

WARNING

The following documentation outlines Online Learning Service's recommended steps for assigning group discussions and group assignments. Although other approaches may exist for creating groups when assigning content, implementing other strategies outside of the prescribed method below will result in students being unable to access materials through the Group navigation tab in your course.

Recommended steps for assigning group items

Step 1: Create the group set

Create a group set in the Groups tab of your course navigation. This group set may be one that you wish to use over the course of the semester (such as individual sections in a merged course) or it may be a set that is specific to a particular assignment/discussion.

The example to the right shows two examples of different groups sets, each created for a different purpose.

(For information on creating groups sets, visit our Answers page "Ultra Course - Groups")

Step 2: Create the assignment/discussion

To assign a Group Assignmentor Discussion, begin by creating the respective item on the Course Content stream.

For more information on how to create content and information on the different content items, click here.

Step 3: Access the item settings

Once you have created the item, open the item's settings by clicking the gear icon to the right of the settings.

When the settings panel opens, scroll down to the "Additional Tools."Select the option to "Assign to groups"

Step 4: Assign via "Reuse Groups" option

When you select to assign an item to groups, a view will appear identical to that of the Group Set creation view.

It is important to avoid creating Custom, Randomly assigned, or Self-enrollment groups at this stage.

Next to the "Group students" option, click on the drop down menu (currently set to "Custom").

Within this drop down menu, a section titled "Reuse groups" will appear, listing the current groups that exist in your course.

Select the group set you previously created that you wish to assign to the Assignment or Discussion.

Select "Save" in the bottom right hand corner.
Select "Save" again in the item settings.

Improvement to the management of group discussions from Instructor View

When an instructor views a group discussion on Ultra, there is a subtle but very important addition that they will see within the discussion page. A drop down menu will appear below the discussion topic that allows the instructor to easily navigate between the group discussions without having to leave the page and navigate to a separate group's page. The video below illustrates this unique Ultra course feature:

REVIEW - Assigning Discussions & Assignments to Existing Groups