1. To enable students to be arranged into different groups for different activities (e.g., one set of groups for discussion and another for an assignment).
2. To assign eClass content to specific groups of users (e.g., assigning a document only to a specific subset of students in your course).

Creating Groupings:

Groupings are 'groups of groups,' so you have to create groups first in order to create groupings (see our article Setting Up Groups).

1. From your course homepage, click on the Participants tab at the top of your course page:

2. Click on the Enrolled users dropdown and select Groupings:

3. Click on Create grouping:

4. Give your grouping a name (required) and a description (if desired). Then, click Save changes.

5. After you have created your grouping it will appear in a row on the Groupings Table. The table shows all course groupings, the groups in each grouping, the number of activities that have been assigned to the grouping, and the editing options for the grouping.

Adding groups to Groupings:

1. To add groups to a Grouping, click on the Show groups in grouping icon in the far right column:

2. Similarly to adding members to groups, adding groups to groupings also gives you a page with two columns: the left, 'Existing members'' shows groups that are part of your Grouping and the right, 'Potential members,' shows the groups available for you to add to your grouping.

3. Click on a group's name in the 'Potential members' column to select it, then click the Add button between the two columns to move them to your grouping.

Note: you may also use the Shift key to select a block of groups (click user, hold Shift, click another user). Or, you can use the Control key (Ctrl) (or Command (Cmd) on a Mac) key to select multiple groups that are not in a row (hold Ctrl while selecting multiple groups).

4. When you are done adding groups to the grouping, click Back to groupings at the bottom of the page.

Enabling grouping restrictions

To use the groups specified by a particular grouping in an assignment or activity, you will have to set the Groupings options. These settings no longer restrict access to members of the selected grouping - see Restrict Access below.

1. To change settings to add grouping options, click Edit mode at the top right of your course page.

2. Click the 3-dot dropdown and then Edit settings, to the right of the activity name:

3. Scroll down to Common module settings area and enter the following:

a. Set the 'Group mode,' 'Visible groups' if your students should see but not affect other groups, or 'Separate groups' if your student should neither see nor affect other groups.  This setting is not required if your grouping contains only one group.

b. Set "Grouping" to the specific grouping you have set up for this resource/activity.

4. Click Save and return to course.

Grouping examples:

Mixing up the groups for various group activities: if you have multiple group activities throughout your course, but don't want students to be working with the same people all the time, you can use groupings to set up different groups for your different activities.

• Example: You divide your class into 3 groups (A, B and C) and add these groups to a grouping called 'Wiki'. You then divide your class into 4 different groups (1, 2, 3 and 4) and add these groups to a grouping called 'Discussion'. When you create your activities, you set your Wiki to use the Wiki grouping (which includes groups A, B and C) and you set your Discussion forum to use the Discussion grouping (which contains groups 1, 2, 3 and 4). Your students will be in one group to complete the wiki and another for the discussion forum.

You can also break the students in each section of a combined course up into smaller groups for group activities.

• Example: Divide the students in Lec A1 into three groups (A, B and C) and then add these groups to a Grouping A1 so that groups A, B and C can be used for group activities contained restricted to their lecture section.

Restrict access:

1. To limit an entire activity to a grouping, open the Common module settings in the activity, and click on Add group/grouping access restriction.

2. Open Restrict access settings.

3. Add the grouping from the Grouping access restriction if it has not already populated.