Blackboard Groups

You can divide the students enrolled in your Blackboard course or organisation into groups, which will enable you to:

• Set up group assignments
• Set up group tools
• Show or hide content based on group membership
• Email all students in your course from a particular group

Setting up a single Group

1. Click on the Users and Groups link in the Control Panel and click Groups
   
2. Click Create, then under Single Group, select Manual Enroll
   
3. Add a Name and a Description for the group
4. Choose the tools you wish the students to use. If you only want to use groups to show content using adaptive release, untick all tools
5. Untick Collaboration, Academic Materials, Basic LTI Tools mashup and Commercial Content Tools if available
6. In the Membership section, click the Add Users button
   
7. Choose the users from the course that you want to add to the group and click Submit to complete the selection
   
8. Click Submit again to save all of your changes
   

Setting up other types of groups

Multiple Groups and types of enrolment

To set up multiple groups all at once, you can create a group set (for example, setting up 10 groups of 5 students with the same tools and settings). The only difference from setting up a regular standalone group is that you must specify the number of groups you need. If you are using Random Enrol, or Self-Enrol, you must also specify the number of students to be assigned to each one.

Group sets also allow you to create a number of groups for self sign up by students, but only allow access to one of these for each. Once a group is selected by the student, they no longer see the alternative groups - only the one the are now self enrolled in.

Enrolment Types

When creating your groups, there are three ways to enrol users:

• Manual Enroll - you manually enroll all users into the groups you have set up
• Self- Enroll - Students enroll themselves into available groups
• Random Enroll - Students are enrolled automatically by the system into available groups randomly

* As a Blackboard tutor (Instructor), you can override group membership if required!