Many instructors split their classes into groups to work on class projects or to discuss class materials. Assigning students to a group in Blackboard gives that group a private space in your course to collaborate online. You may enable a discussion board, a chat room, file sharing, email, a blog, a journal, or a wiki for each group to facilitate their work in your course.

You can also create a set of groups to speed up the creation of multiple groups simultaneously, and allow manual enroll, self-enroll, or random enroll of students in the groups.

Creating a Group

1. From the Control Panel click on Users and Groups.

2. From the dropdown list select Groups.

3. Click Create Single Group and then click Manual Enroll if you wish to enroll all users manually or click Self-Enroll if you want the students to join the groups by themselves.

4. Type the Group name and description.

Make sure you make the Group Available to your students by clicking ‘Yes’ if you are ready for the students to view the group as soon as it is created.

NOTE:

If you use numbers in your group names and have more than nine groups, you may find that Blackboard lists all groups that begin with “1” together, resulting in Group 10 through Group 19 being listed before Group 2.  You can force Blackboard to list correctly by using leading zeros in your group names, e.g., Group 01, Group 02, Group 03…Group 10.

5. Enable the collaborative functions you want to give the group by clicking in the box to the left of each function.

6. If you want to allow group members to personalize the group space modules, enable Allow Personalization under the Module Personalization Setting area.

7. Add members to the group by selecting all members of the class, one individual member, or more than one member at a time.

a. To select all members from the list, click Select All and then click the  button to add them to the Selected Items list. 

  

b. If you want to select one particular member, click on that name in the list and click the  button. This will move the name into the Selected Items list.

c. If you wish to select more than one member, but not the entire list, press and hold the Ctrl key on your keyboard while clicking on the desired members’ names and then click the  button.

Once you have selected the members, and the names have moved to the Selected Items list, click Submit.

Note: You can click the Invert Selection button for selecting all members outside of your current selection.

8. Click Submit to create the group.

Students can find their groups, along with a listing of group members and enabled group tools, from My Groups on the home page of the course.

Creating a Set of Groups

1. After you select Groups from the Control Panel, click on the Create Group Set button.

2. Select one of the different ways to enroll students into their groups: 

• Self-Enroll
  
• Give a name to the Group.
• Give a name to the Sign-up Sheet, which is used by students to self-enroll into the groups.

• Make sure you make the group, or at least the Sign-up Sheet, available so that students can enroll themselves.

• Enter the number of groups you want the class to be divided into.

• Manual Enroll
  
• Give a Name to the group.
• Enter the Number of Groups you want to create.
• After you click Submit and create the groups, you can edit each group individually.
• Check ‘Remove Members already in a Group from the Available Members List’ to assign each member to only one group

• Click the Randomize Enrollments button to randomize the member name list in the selection boxes for each group.
• You can also add a new group by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.
• Click Submit when you have finished enrolling the members in the groups.

• Random Enroll
• Give a Name to the group.
• In the Membership area, choose the appropriate options according to the way you want to distribute the members into each group.

• Click Submit to save the changes.
  

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