Creating Groups

Understanding Groups and Group Sets within a Course

A "Group" is like a little mini-course on Canvas. Groups are attached to a specific course, and usually have a subset of students from that class participating in the group. Instructors can make a group of groups (called a "Group Set" on Canvas) and assign students into those groups.

Here are two examples:

In this example, the class has a group set named "Disc. Groups" - maybe for weekly online discussions, plus another group set named "Field Trip Rides" - maybe for a one-time event.

Within the group set "Disc. Groups," each student in the class can be assigned to "Group 1" or "Group 2" or "Group 3" or may be unassigned and not have access to any of those three groups.

In order for there to be any group, instructors must first create a group set. You can't have just a group on its own - each group has to be a part of a group set - even if there's only one group in that group set.

Note: Students can also create their own student groups. Those groups will show up in a special group set called "Student Groups" and can't be used for grading or common discussion topics.

Setting Up Group Sets in a Course (Instructors / TAs)

For more details, see the official Canvas documentation: How do I Create a Groups Set?

In summary: start at the People link, then click the blue +Group Set button.

Next, choose a name ("Weekly Discussion" in this example), and choose some options:

If you choose "Self Sign-Up" make sure your "People" navigation link on the left side is not hidden from students. Students will be able to organize themselves in to however many groups you've created. After students have put themselves in to groups, you may want to edit the groups setting again and un-check "Self Sign-Up" so the groups don't change.

You can also set up groups manually or randomly. If you do that, you can move students between groups by grabbing the little dots to the left of their name and dragging the name to a new group (see first image, above).