Work with groups

Working with Groups

Through its group features, Canvas offers a largely untapped resource for students and faculty, especially on the project management front. More specifically, faculty can easily enable groups in Canvas for discussions, assignments, or team collaboration. Working with Groups in your course can be rewarding and challenging.

To create groups in Canvas, faculty have three options: automatic (Canvas will create your groups), manual (faculty will select the students for each group), and self-sign-up (students will put themselves into groups).

How Can I Use Groups in Canvas?

Project Groups: Canvas provides robust project management capabilities for student work groups. Even if you have no intention of using Canvas for assignment submissions, creating the groups via the “People” tab will provide each group of students with their own site within Canvas. This site features the same Announcements, Discussions, Pages, Files, Collaborations, and Conferences functions found in the main Canvas site.

Additionally, faculty have access to each group site and are able to monitor work or provide assistance. By encouraging students to use their group sites for communication, collaboration, and file sharing, faculty can also provide feedback on basic project management skills.

Group Discussions: When creating a discussion, the group feature allows you to break the class into smaller discussion groups. A class of 100 can easily become 10 groups of 10. This allows for more focused discussions among students, and faculty can easily navigate from one discussion to the next.

Group Assignments: Creating a group assignment provides students with their own Canvas group site detailed above, and also allows for single or multiple submissions in the main Canvas course. Faculty can choose to grade each student individually or to give one grade to the entire group when creating the assignment in Canvas.

Group sets can be generated whenever an assignment or discussion is created. Project groups can also be created independently by students or faculty in the “People” section of a course site. Once a group set is created, faculty have the option to use the same groups for multiple assignments or discussions.

What are the benefits for students?

Organization, communication, and collaboration capabilities are all enhanced through groups in Canvas, eliminating the need for emails, phone calls, and additional meetings, and providing an online workspace in and out and of class.  Options for free web conferencing and the ability to create and link to Google Docs are also included.

Convenience: Canvas automatically adds groups a student is enrolled in under the “Courses & Groups” tab of the top navigation bar.