Using Oncourse, how do I manage study groups or project teams?

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Note: To complete these procedures, you must be assigned a role having the necessary permissions. To determine your role, follow the directions in Participant roles. To view a list of permissions associated with a given role, see Permissions, roles, and tools. For a basic understanding of roles and permissions, see Permissions and roles: Overview.

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Overview

Groups are subsets of participants for a given site. They are created by the site manager and are not preloaded with official course data. Groups are useful to organize study groups, project teams, and other non-official subsets of site participants.

Note: When combining sections into a parent site, groups from the original sections will not be brought forward. However, each section behaves like a group on the parent site, i.e., group-aware tools recognize each section as a group.

You can use groups with the following tools:

Announcements: Post announcements for a group.
Assignments 2: Post assignments for specific groups, and link them to the Gradebook. (Multiple assignments can be linked to one Gradebook item.)
Calendar: Schedule events for specific groups only.
Forums: Assign forum and topic permissions for groups; see Controlling access to Forums.
Messages: Send private messages to a group.
Resources: Allow specific access to files and folders for a group.
Site Setup: Create, modify, and remove groups.
Tests & Surveys: Allow specific access to a test or survey for a group by using the "Assessments Released To" setting.

Managing groups

You can manage groups with the Site Setup and Worksite Setup tools.

To manage groups with the Site Setup tool:

In your site's menubar, click Site Setup.
Click Manage Groups.

To manage groups with the Worksite Setup tool:

Click My Workspace.
From the menubar, click Worksite Setup.
Check the box next to the course for which you wish to manage groups, and from the top, click Edit.
Click Manage Groups.

Also see Viewing participants in your site.

Creating a group

To create a new group:

Navigate to the group management interface for your site (see Managing groups above).
Click Create New Group.
In the "Title" field, enter a title for your group (e.g., Project team 1). You may also add a text description.
From the window on the left, select a site participant to add to the group, and then click >> . Repeat this step until you've added all the members you wish to the group. To select more than one member at a time, hold down the Ctrl key (in Windows) or the Command key (in Mac OS X), and select the members you wish to add.
Alternatively, click All>> to move all site participants to the right-hand window, select any participants you do not want in the group, and click << to remove them.
When you're finished, click Add.

Note: It is not possible to create a new group based on existing group (i.e., duplicate an existing group).

Editing a group

To edit a group:

Navigate to the group management interface for your site (see Managing groups above).
Next to the group title, click Edit.
You may revise the "Title" and "Description" fields. You may also add or remove group members as described above.
When you're finished, click Update.

Deleting a group

To delete a group:

Navigate to the group management interface for your site (see Managing Groups above).
Next to the group you wish to remove, check the box under Remove.
Click Remove Checked.
To confirm removal, click Delete Groups.

Feature demonstrations

All the following feature demonstrations include audio, and each link will open a new window.

This is document atcs in domains all, oncoursecl, sakai-all, and sakaiht.
Last modified on January 06, 2012.