Best Practices for Group Enrollment
To illustrate best practices for group enrollment, the following scenario includes a class of 185 students.
Your latest assignment requires students to use a software program that is only available in certain labs which must be booked and supervised. You book 4 labs that can hold 50 students each and create 4 corresponding groups.
You select the following group options:
- For the Enrollment Type, you select # of Groups and set the Number of Groups to 4.
- You leave both Auto-enroll new users and Randomize users in groups unchecked because new students will not be joining your course and you are not worried about having an unbiased distribution of students, since group membership will not influence students’ grades.
- You select Set up discussion areas and create discussion forums where students can post and answer questions about the computer software.
- You leave Set up lockers and Set up assignment folders cleared because you do not want students collaborating on their projects and you already have your assignments organized.
Note: On the Enroll Users page, an Advanced Search Options link displays. Instructors can use this custom search and enroll page to filter students according to certain criteria to determine who to put into each group.
In the following scenario, you have a class of 29 students.
Your latest assignment requires that students research a particular topic, write a report on it, and hold a seminar for the class. You know that you want students to work in groups of 5, but you want to give them some flexibility in choosing both who they work with and what topic they work on.
You select the following group options:
- For the Enrollment Type, you select Groups of # – Self Enrollment. You set the Number of Users per group to 5 and rename each of the 6 groups after the topic the group will work on.
- You select Set up discussion areas and create discussion topics for each of the groups. You associate the topics with a grade item and tell students that you expect them to communicate with each other on their progress and concerns in the discussion topic for their group. They receive individual grades based on their participation.
- You select Set up lockers and encourage students to save their collaborative work in their group Locker area.
- You select Set up assignment folders and create separate assignment folders for each group’s Research Notes, Report, and Seminar Notes. You associate the folders with grade items and assign the same grade to all members of the group.