New to Using Groups and Groupings?
If you are new to Groups and Groupings in AsULearn, consider reviewing the Groups in AsULearn article before proceeding.
Introduction
Group Self-Selection is an AsULearn activity that will allow your students to sort themselves into groups in your course. In terms of workflow, we recommend that you create the groups ahead of time (see Creating and Managing Groups ), and then set up this activity for students to self-select into a group you've created.
If students' group membership will change throughout the semester, you can create multiple instances of the Group self-selection activity in your course. We recommend using groupings to manage the sets of groups you plan to use for each activity (see Creating and Managing Groupings ).
Using Group Self-Selection
1. Open your course in AsULearn, then enable Edit mode.
2. Click +Add an activity or resource or the ⊕ icon in the topic where the activity should be created.
3. In the activity chooser, click Group self-selection.
Tip
You can click on the mark icons for more information about specific settings.
Configuring a Group self-selection activity
General settings
- Name: The link name that will show on the activity on your course home page. Make it clear and human-readable, such as "Choose your Project Group" or similar.
- Open from/until: These set the date and time period in which students can choose their group. Note you can effectively enable a deadline for the activity with Open until and the activity will have a "due" date.
- Select groups from grouping: If you do not have any groupings, just leave this set at All groups. If you already have a grouping (a set of groups) created, you can point this activity at that particular set of groups by selecting a grouping here. That would limit the available groups to just the ones contained in that grouping.
- If students' group membership will change throughout the semester, you can create multiple instances of the Group self-selection activity in your course. We recommend using groupings to manage the groups for each activity (see Creating and Managing Groupings ).
- Min members per group: The minimum number of members a group needs.
- Max members per group: The maximum number of members allowed in a group.
- Maximum number of groups to participate in: In most use cases you will set this to 1.
General permissions settings
We strongly recommend using the following settings:
- Enable Participants can join groups
- Enable Participants can leave groups
Caution
Though it's possible to configure this activity's settings to allow students to create and name their own groups, as well as set a password for joining, we typically do not recommend doing this. It's previously led to disappointing outcomes.
Miscellaneous settings
The default settings in this section typically work best.
When you are satisfied with your settings, click the Save and return to course button at the bottom of the page.
When your students visit this activity, they will be presented with the list of groups you created and selected, and with the options you defined (e.g. how many members can join a group). Students will need to click the Become member of button to join their selected group.
