Create and manage groups in Minerva - Staff Guide
Staff can organise students into Groups within a module or an organisation. The workflow is that you create one or more Group Sets and then create individual Groups within those Sets. The important thing to remember is that within a given Group Set, each student can only be added to a single Group. So if you want the same students to be placed into different Groups for different purposes, you will need to create more than one Group Set.
Groups can be used for the following purposes:
- Group Blackboard Assessments- A single Group Set can be associated with a Blackboard Assignment, Test, or Discussion via the assessment settings. Students will then contribute to the Assignment / Test / Discussion as groups, according to their membership of the Groups contained in that particular Set.
- Releasing module content - Module content can be released to individual Groups, using Conditional Availability. Note that, when using Conditional Availability, Groups from different Sets can be selected. For more information, see guidance on using Conditional Availability.
- Delegated Grading - Blackboard Assignments have a Delegated Grading feature. Grading can be delegated to different staff members via Group membership.
- Creating Breakout Rooms in Collaborate - A single Group Set can be selected within Collaborate to create Breakout Rooms based on the membership of the Groups in that particular Set. Note that Sets must contain 20 or fewer Groups in order to be used in this way. For more information, see the Breakout Groups guidance on Collaborate's website.
- Filtering Turnitin Assignment Inboxes - An individual Group (from any Set) can be selected in a Turnitin Assignment Inbox, in order to filter the Inbox to display only the submissions from the students in that particular group. This can be useful in cases where marking has been allocated to different members of staff. For more information, see the guidance on using Groups to filter a Turnitin Assignment inbox.
- Group Space - Staff and students can click on the Group name and see any content assigned to this Group. At the moment, this will only be Group Blackboard Assignments i.e. where students work on an assignment together and submit one assignment on behalf of the Group. Future developments are planned in this area.
If you used Groups in Original modules (used in 21/22 modules and earlier), there are no Group Tools options in Ultra Course View. Instead, items such as a Discussion have to be added to Module Content and then individually released to Groups via the settings.
You can assign students to Groups in 4 different ways:
- Custom - You manually assign students to Groups.
- Randomly assign - The system randomly assigns students to Groups (based on an overall number of Groups which you specify).
- Self-enrolment - Students are allowed to assign themselves to a chosen Group. You define the maximum Group size. You can optionally define an enrolment period, after which any students who have not self-enrolled will be randomly assigned to a Group with free spaces.
- Spreadsheet upload - You can import Group Sets and populate them with students by uploading a .csv spreadsheet.
To create Group Sets, select Groups from the Navigation bar.
The Group Sets page will then be displayed where you will create your Group Sets and individual Groups.
Watch - Create Groups
Learn how to create Groups in Minerva (2 minutes)
Read - Create Groups
The Blackboard support site includes step by step guidance on creating Groups.