Groups in Canvas

Groups are essentially a miniature course site that students can use to interact with one another, collaborate on projects, and complete group assignments.

As an instructor, you can create groups you assign students to (manually or automatically) or which they can choose for themselves. Students can belong to multiple groups of both types.

The "What Are Groups?" Canvas Guide Links to an external site. and this accompanying video covers the process of creating and managing groups:

312 - Groups Overview Links to an external site. from Instructure Canvas Community Links to an external site.. See transcript Links to an external site..

Group Features

As member of a group, students have access to a number of features for working together and communicating with each other:

• Announcements: group members can post announcements to the group and automated announcements will appear for some group activities, including individual  messages.
• Pages. Just as you can create pages for everyone, group members can do the same to create shared content for their group, however there are no Modules within groups and group pages can be edited by all group members.
• Discussions. Group discussions have essentially the same features as discussion you create, but limited to the group.
• Files. File sharing, quite useful for Word, Powerpoint, etc., but can be used for just about any file type

Groups are quite useful for students to work together without any particular assignment involved or out of which students submit their own individual assignments using the Assignment types we've already covered.

However, groups can also be used for Group Assignments, in which a single submission is made for all the members of a group. See the next page of this module for details.