Overview
This guide explains what groups are within Learning Space, how they can be created and how they can be used.
Contents
- Video guide
- What are groups?
- Creating and assigning students to groups
- Using groups within Learning Space activities
- Restricting access to content based on groups
- Further support
Video guide
What are groups?
A group is a method of organising students on a course/module/technical resource page. This is beneficial for modules with large cohorts as students can be easily grouped into teams, grouped for tutorials as well as allowing staff to make content visible to students from particular groups.
Important: The Group Choice activity feature within Learning Space allows students to enrol themselves into a particular group within a module, for example choosing a project group to be a participant in. For full guidance on that activity please view the Group Choice activity for Staff guide.
Creating and assigning students to groups
1. Firstly, select the module that you are trying to create a group for and select "Participants" from the menu on the left.
2. Next, click the cog icon above the "Subscribe users" button and select "Groups" from the drop down menu.
3. You will then be presented with the groups window, click on the "Create group" button to create a new group.
4. Next you need to give the group a name such as "Group A" and add an optional description.
5. In the example below we have created a group called "Example Group", click on the group you want to add users to and click the "Add/remove users" button.
6. From this menu you can select a user on the right and then click "< Add" to add them to the group. In this example we've added the ET team to our group.
7. A group has successfully been created and you can now add/remove staff and students from a group.
Using Groups within Learning Space activities
To help ensure students only see the information that is relevant to them, it is recommended that staff use Groups within Learning Space activities. The example below shows you how to apply Groups to a Forum activity in Learning Space.
1. You can enable Groups for an activity by clicking on the ‘Edit’ dropdown belonging to the activity, and selecting ‘Edit settings’. (Tip: make sure you have turned editing on in Learning Space. This button can be found in the top right of the screen, next to your profile picture.)
2. Scroll down to the heading ‘Restrict access’. Click on the heading to open the section and select ‘Add restriction…’
3. Select ‘Group’.
4. Then, use the dropdown for ‘Group’ to select the group(s) you would like to limit access to.
5. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the page and select either ‘Save and return to module’ or ‘Save and display’ to save your changes. Or click ‘Cancel’ to discard your changes.
Groups are particularly important in Forums to ensure that students do not receive too many notification emails. For more information on forums please visit our guide to Forum for Staff.
Restricting access to content based on groups
It can sometimes be useful to restrict access to content based on groups, for example on a course page you may only want a section to be visible to a first or second year student.
1. To achieve this, simply enable editing, and then select the 'Edit' dropdown and 'Edit topic'.
2. Then from the settings page, scroll down to the 'Restrict Access' section.
3. Select "Add restriction..." and then "Group".
4. Next choose the group that you want to be able to see the content.
Important: At this stage, all students can still see the hidden content except it will be greyed out to those who do not have access. To make the content truly invisible to users who do not have access, you must click the eye icon and ensure it is crossed.
5. As a staff member, once you hit "Save changes", you will see the following label that details who has access to the content.
Further support
For further support on Learning Space, or to report any issues with this guide, please get in touch with the Digital Learning Team via dlsupport@falmouth.ac.uk. Alternatively, please refer to the numerous help guides found on our Knowledge Base.
View the Accessibility Statement for all of our support guides.