Possible groups features?

Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
Number of replies: 35
I'm doing some work on groups at the moment. I've spent quite a bit of time looking through old posts on this forum to see what sort of problems people have, but I was wondering if there were any groups features that people were desperate for or thought might be a nice idea?

No promises, and obviously no guarantee that this code will make it into core, but I'll do my best smile But I'm making some relatively major changes so there might be things that are easy to add in now but hard later.

One thing I'm doing is introducing the concept of a grouping - a set of groups. You can set up more than one grouping for a course and then pick which grouping you want for an activity, so you don't have to have the same groups for every activity in a course. I'm also doing some stuff to enable automatic generation of groups (any ideas there for what would be most useful?) and have changed the database structure of the groups tables to make it easier to use the same groups for more than one course. 
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Brian Sea -
Please get in touch with Don Hinkelman as we have done some work on groups in regard to the new Project Module.  For instance, there is code for student generation of groups based on project topic, vote-based and randomly assigned.  Currently they do not alter the Moodle core groups (though this would be VERY nice), but are specific within the current Project activity. 

This work was done just this last semster.  The testing of such features is pretty scare.

--sea
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Michael Gage -
I'd like to be able to allow a self-selection method (with a cap) which allows students to select themselves into groups. (In my case the groups are workshop/recitations which meet physically at different times, so it is easiest if the students are allowed to schedule themselves.)

What I've set up for the moment (I won't have a chance to try it until this fall) is a Choice activity which allows the students to choose their group, and to change it if needed. Once the dust settles I'll use their choices to make a group. It seems to me it would be convenient if this last step could be done automatically.

I would of course want a locking mechanism, so that after a certain period the students could not continue to change their groups.

Good luck with the project.

Take care,
Mike
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Michael Gage

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
If  you've got a list of userids that should be in each group it should be pretty easy to then create the groups using my library. I guess you'd want a button the teacher can press which says 'create groups now based on this Choice Activity', after which the students wouldn't be able to change?

I haven't really looked at the Choice module at all - might be worth me doing so, so I don't end up reinventing the wheel.

It'd be nice to give the teacher a choice as to whether the students can see who else is in the groups already or not. Can you think of anything else that is handy?
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Michael Gage

Re: Possible groups features?

by Josep M. Fontana -
Michael,

I'd be interested in finding out how you use the choice activity to form groups. I would imagine you create a choice between, say, G1, G2, G3,... and then have students choose among them. But as far as I know, there is no way of establishing a cap in the choice module. So what do you do if, for instance, most people in your class choose one group and the others are left empty?

Josep M.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Josep M. Fontana

Re: Possible groups features?

by Michael Gage -
The latest version of the choice module allows you to limit the number of students who can choose a particular group. See

http://docs.moodle.org/en/mod/choice/mod#Limit_the_number_of_responses_allowed

Once the limit mode is enabled you can choose a limit for each group by filling in the box to the right of each choice. The pop-up box for enabling the limit mode is in the lower right of the screen.
Attachment screenshot_01.jpg
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Michael Gage

Re: Possible groups features?

by Vera Dammann -

Dear Michael,

the idea of using the choice module for building groups with limited numbers of students sounds perfect.

Maybe it's a typical greenhorn question by me: how can I later get the selection of students of the different choices into resp. working groups? I've several courses with more than 200 students how have to be assigned to a dozen of laboratory groups like in your example. Further work shall then be done in the typical group mode.

Vera

 

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Rick Barnes -

I would like to be able to set up activities that are specific to groups so that a generic course can be used by all the staff in my department and that all teachers can then add extra items specifically for their group/groups.

I would also like the ability to set different deadlines for different groups, at the moment we have to leave the deadlines open and enforce them ourselves, or let pupils submit after the deadlines and use the records to show how late work was. This would be most useful if it was optional to keep the set up simple for people who do not need this feature.

The suggestions about pupils selecting groups sound great; this could be good for a whole course but could also be useful for just some of the activities/content, with teacher defined groups for the remainder of the course. Could these groups be separate to the normal groups (pupils could be members of more than one group).

Rick.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Rick Barnes

Re: Possible groups features?

by Richard Williamson -

Rick, the ability to set alternate deadlines for different groups is exactly what I'm looking for at the moment. Thinking about it, this must be a pretty important aspect for many people. Surely someone out there has a hack for this? thoughtful

I also note the following from the Moodle Roadmap:

Version 2.1
Groups
Groups can also be defined at the site level, and activities can be assigned to course groups

Unfortunately, this does not look like making an appearance until early 2007 sad

Regards
Richard Williamson

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Richard Williamson

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
It's something that I've noticed gets asked about here a lot - I'm tempted to ask on the Assignment Module forum about it, as it's the module itself that would need to implement it. You'd need to change the database structure I think to do so, so it's not going to be a really trivial change. 
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Dan Hudkins -
We are in the early stage of implementing with the hope of rolling it out across our school. Most teachers teach more than 1 section of a given course, and we will be using groups to as a way of segregating the sections. In our middle school, all classes meet daily, so being "out of sync" on an assignment or activity is relatively uncommon - however - in our upper school - we run a schedule of 2 short blocks, 1 long block, 1 short block - as 4 periods over 5 days. In our 8 period day this results in 4 different possible weekly schedules. So - as the long block is used for labs - the same course has labs on two different days. For some sections the week ends on Thursday, for other Friday. I'm sure you get my drift.

Thanks for your willingness to take up the burden... for those of us using Moodle as a tool to support direct instruction in K-12 this would be a real boon.

Dan
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Maia Engeli -
thanks for asking (hope this discussion is still runing).
There are 3 things I would love to have:
  1. self-enrolment of students into groups
  2. self-creation of groups by students
  3. sub-groups (groups within groups)
Explanation regarding sub-groups: There should be two ways for them to be created.
  1. creating sub-groups and assigning students of the top-group to them or
  2. creating a top group and assigning existing groups to the top group
Why I would like this? I like to have students work in pairs in each of my sections. For the final projects the pairs then form larger teams of 4-8 students.

Maia.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Maia Engeli

Re: Possible groups features?

by Timothy Takemoto -

Self-enrolment of students into groups already exists using group enrolment keys. Set an enrolment key at group level and set a dummy enrolment key for the course. The latter will not be used.

Tim

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Possible groups features?

by Alex Guy -
Hi,
We tried what you specified in your last post:
We did the following:
1) Set up an enrollment key for the course
2) We set up an enrollment at group level
And then as a user trying to enrol in the course, we provided the group key for the course, it did not enrol the user in the course in the proper group.
We just received an error.

Is there some special setting for the group key we need to tweak?
This was done using version 1.7 Did things change since ver1.6?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Maia Engeli

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
I'm still listening! I hadn't thought of the situation you describe with working to merge sets of pairs into larger groups - that's useful. 
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Enrique Castro -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers
Dear Juliette,
You may want to visit the virtual campus of ULPGC at   http://telepresencial.ulpgc.es/moodle2006/
We have been using for the whole last academic year (october 2005 -september 2006) a custom group setting very much like you describe. Groups of groups and selecting which groups use an activity (on a per activity basis). We called it "group scopes", we introduced this as a way to achieve membership to multiple groups in moodle 1.5. Within a course a teacher can create several Scopes for groups. And within each Scope the teacher creates groups that "live" in that scope. This is the concept of sets of groups: groupings. At module level we added a new common setting "Scope". Thus when adding a new activity the teacher can select the group mode and the set of groups that the activity will use, via the Scope.

For instance I teach a biochemistry course with around 100 students. I set three Scopes
Theory: with groups Lecture A, Lecture B each of about 50 students
Laboratory: with groups Lab1, Lab2, Lab3, Lab4 each of about 25 students
Project: 25-30 teams of 2-3-4 students.

I setup a "doubts forum" as separate groups using scope Theory, so in this forum LectureA students discuss within themselves (and with teacher of that lecture group), and LectureB  students do not mix with A.
I set up a Wiki to work on Laboratory results. This wiki is set using groups and scope Laboratory, so actually I have 4 wikis, one for each LabN group.
Finally, the students work on small teams in a bibliographic project, searching the biochemical basis of an illness and presenting a written paper on it. To do that I set up an assignment with Scope parameter as Project , and a custom page "groupupload" assignment type.

This whole thing has worked with moodle 1.5 for the last year at our >20.000 students university. I find it quite easy (but I developed the idea). For Moodle 1.6 there is less need for  Scopes /Groupings, since now multiple groups are standard. I only see a "management" problem: users getting confused about the group they are using. Now the students can be members of several groups at once,  either  LectureA/B or LabN or projectN groups, all of them appear in the visible/separate group menu. My fear is that if I set up the Wiki for laboratory work I will get work submitted as LectureA or ProjectN, rather than using the right Lab group (a given student will be member of just one or each Lecture, Lab Project groups).
Scopes/Groupings are not technically necessary for multiple membership now, but may be essential to organize and structure the course, avoiding too much flexibility that will promote user errors.

In addition to the main effects, the Scopes customization at ULPGC allowed us to set a page for the students to self-assign to groups (within each scope). This page was derived from an old idea of Gustav Delius. I have adapted it to work in moodle 1.6, but better present it in a new thread.

Please feel free to contact me via e-mail for details of our Scopes customization. It is very easy, but involves changes to core moodle libraries.
Enrique









Average of ratings: -
In reply to Enrique Castro

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
Read your other post first! I actually think (though I'm guessing here) that the main demand for multiple group membership was actually to allow teachers to belong to more than one group so that they could mark the work of certain groups. But as you say, using multiple group membership as a way to deal with several sets of groups for a course certainly isn't at all ideal. 
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Wish List

by Geraldo Xexeo -

Thanks for your work and ears...

Here comes a wish list.

  1. Groups should have types in a hierarchy.
    1. Names of the hierarchy should have diferent names.
    2. All names should be assigned by the user.
    3. Students in one part of the hiearachy should not be in another part.
    • Example: Hierarchy:    Class->Group
    • Class1, Class2 and Class3 are groups of type Class
    • Class1 has groups Group1C1, Group2C1
    • Every student in Group1C1 and Group2C1 must belong to Class1
    • A student in Class2 cannot belong to Group1C1, Group2C1
    • Course is the top of the hierarchy
Students can create and assign themselves to groups
  1. This should be set by configuration of the group
There should be a set of rules for groups, including:
  1. Min size (warning for teacher), Max size (only teacher can override)
  2. Dates to enroll
  3. How many groups students can be in
  4. Students can exchange groups in a course
  5. Max and Min number of subgroups
  6. Can create along the course or not
  7. Is the group a partition? (every student in a different group)
  8. Is the group only a organization? (all students of superior class belong to each group, to allow for diferent partitions)
There should be a exclusion/inclusion list
  1. some people can't be in the same group (cannot link restriction)
  2. some people must be in the same group (must link restriction)
Groups should be general (for all course) or assigment specific
  1. Students shold be able, if allowed, to present different tasks in dfferent groups
Groups should be reused among courses, like grades areOperations
  1. join groups
  2. split group
  3. automatically create groups from a superior group in the hierarchy
  4. ban group (these students cannot link anymore)
Groups should be allowed to have special roles
  1. Some roles should be default in the system
    1. teacher / supervisor / tutor
    2. leader
  2. Other roles should be "creatable"
    1. Example: writer, photographer
Every assigment should be "groupable",
  1. with submissions and grades being by group or by person, accordingly to the teacher selection.
  2. Even if a teacher selects "by group", he should be able to override this.
  3. Assigments should be assigned to one specific level of group
  4. Assigments should be able to have their own groups
Every assigment should be able to be divided in role parts (long shot)
  1. Each member should deliver the part assigned to its role
  2. Actually, this is better implemented as a meta assigment, which contais multiple assigments, that are role specific

That is my wish list. I hope you have infinite resources for doing that and, beyond all, a very happy life!

 

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by mandy honeyman -
Hi Juliette,
Thanks for posting....
You've had lots of responses from the FE/HE sector and I notice one buried response from compulsory ed sector - so to add to that lone voice...

Groups is pretty complicated to administer in the comp. sector - because the kids take so many courses, so my big wish would be for it to be easier to deal with lots of students at the same time, or, alternatively  to do searches based on a particular setting so that the initial selection of students needing to be moved/assigned to groups would be smaller and relevant to the course.

What I mean is this:
for example, I use the "department" setting in the user table to indicate which year cohort the student belongs to; if I could choose to only see students from this one cohort when assigning them to groups it would mean that I could then ask the teachers to assign the students to groups themselves. (Actually, we now use email addresses that identify cohorts, so this is possible from the search table, but the next wish still applies).

Otherwise I have to do group assignment via uploaduser.php (which only allows for 5 groups/courses at a time, pretty annoying when your students do a minimum of 14 courses a year and the script only accepts about a hundred users at a time). - That would be my second wish, for uploaduser.php to be re-written to allow for any number of course/group choices.

I realise that this is not the kind of response you were probably hoping for as it is probably out of your remit but just in case, here's hoping.... approve
cheers
Mandy

PS: Because I happen to be fiddling with this right now, sorry, wouldn't it be great if we could use the meta groups facility to at least set the students up into one or two groups. For example: all students at our school are in tutor groups, and many of their courses are taught in tutor groups, and many of our courses are meta courses, therefore, it follows, that if we could set them up once in the meta course attaching them to their tutor group, the tutor group setting, at least would follow them into all the meta courses. Of course, this doesn't work for sets and options at GCSE, but it's a start smile
Average of ratings: -
In reply to mandy honeyman

Re: Possible groups features?

by Andy Hawkins -

Just a quick note to second Mandy's desires for handling groups/classes in UK secondary schools. Not sure how other Uk secondary schools handle this.

We are moving Moodle to a new server and plan to implement some auto enrollment if at all possible - initially based on year groups and hopefully tutor groups.

I think I read somewhere of someone uploading several thousand students/courses - it needed extending the php timeout so the script has a chance to complete. Sorry cannot remember if it was uploaduser or another method.

I also think Darren Smith had a method of transferring groups from/between metacourses - but do not know how or where this is. (and unfortunately he is not as regular a visitor now) At least it is apparenlty feasible - or is it already in 1.6 and I have not seen it?

Andy

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Andy Hawkins

Re: Possible groups features?

by Jonathan Smith -

I came across the patch for transferring groups between metacourses.

You can find it in this thread

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=43755#200867

I think it is for 1.5. By cutting and pasting the relevant code (very clearly marked) into my 1.6 version I have tried to update it but have yet to get it to work successfully. It creates the groups but fails to put the pupils in a group.

I get the following message for each user:

Error occurred while adding user XXX to group

The fact that it isnt identifying the ID of the group the user is being added to, leads me to suspect that somewhere the code isnt picking up the required data and is therefore causing the error.

Can anyone shed any light on this? If you get it to work on 1.6 can you let me know just in case I have made a mistake updating the 1.5 version.

Thanks

Jonathan Smith

Average of ratings: -
In reply to mandy honeyman

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
Thanks for taking the time to reply. The hard thing for this I suspect would actually be coming up with a nice user interface.

I have seen a patch floating around I think that lets you add users to more groups using upload users by the way - it's certainly not ideal that the default is so low.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Dave Emsley -

The best possible feature imho would be to be able to create groups without them having course.

The a group could be enrolled on a course (and unenrolled) as a block.  This would work great for most of the Secondary Schools I can think of. 

 

 

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Dave Emsley

Re: Possible groups features?

by Dave Emsley -

Also I'd like a Parent/Sponsor type user.  This Parent/Sponsor could view the course content and the student's grade but could not alter anything.

lookee no touchee?

 

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Dave Emsley

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
I think you can do this with Roles and Permissions in 1.7 when that's released. 
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Rolf Christoffersen -
One group feature that would be useful to me (and others in our department) is if the groups in a metacourse could be assigned automatically based on the enrollment in the child courses.  In my large university lecture courses (~160), students enroll through the individual discussion sections (~20 students per child course) which meet with the TA separately once a week. The assignments are the same for all the sections so all activities will be posted to the metacourse but I want to keep the ability to reply to discussion forums within each discussion section by using groups in the forums.  Is there an easy way to do this?
Thanks,
Rolf
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Rolf Christoffersen

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
Do the students get to choose a discussion section then or are they assigned to them by somebody? Also is the only difference between the sections that the forums are separate?
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Rolf Christoffersen -

The students choose the discussion section when they enroll in the course.  The discussion sections meet at different times with their teaching assistant 1 hr a week and can have different teaching assistants.   I have the idea that by keeping the discussion sections and online groups synchronized would help create create a greater sense of community because the students meet face to face once a week.  So far I have only used Moodle with my small courses with ~15 students and the forums worked very well in that environment.  My students didn't think having 160-180 students posting discussions or replies in a single forum would be desirable.   That is the reason why I want to keep the groups limited to ~20 students in my larger courses (up to 600 students in one of my courses).  Manually assigning students to groups is way too much adminstrative overhead for the typical university faculty and thus we need an automated way to do this.  It seems to me that having the option to assign metacourse groups based on child course enrollment might be generally useful but there may be other ways to achieve a similar result.  Ideally, a variety of options for group assignment would be available within the course settings including:
1. random group assignment
2. allow students  to select their own group with a limit on the number allowed in each group
3. groups assigned by external database
4. groups assigned by child course enrollment.
I would guess that no one single solution would satisfy all our faculty.
Thanks,
Rolf

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Rolf Christoffersen

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
I've written some code for random group assignment - sign up sheets would definitely be nice and are on my wish list. I suspect I won't get the time to do them for 1.8 but they should be relatively straightforward to add later. There does often seem to be a need to import group data from another database - I'm not sure I can think of a nice generic way of doing this. You can include some group info when you're importing users, but often groups get decided after that point and there are possible issues with importing groups information this way.

By the way if you want a short-term solution, you might want to look at group enrolment keys if you haven't already - you can give a different key to the students in each section.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Leonardo Santos -
Hi everybody,

I'm starting working with groups of Moodle. And I notice there's a lot of work to do.
Some easy things that's easy to do I've done.
  • A block that shows "My Groups"
  • Some pages to to visit the group list and the information about a specific group, like participants.
  • And a page to the students erol themsolves in a group.
I made some documentation about that, it's not in a standard form, but I think it's easy to understand. (attachment)

I'm not used to work with a comunity to develop open source, so I ask for your help.

I didn't see anything like that done in Moodle, but I could be wrong. So I want to know how is it going.

Leonardo Santos

PS: I'm sorry for my english!
Attachment Diagrama1.png
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Leonardo Santos

Re: Possible groups features?

by Juliette Culver -
Your English is fine smile

This sounds like a super idea. We're doing some work on groups at the moment that we're hoping to get into 1.8 that will result in some quite bit changes to how groups work, so if you would like to work on this it'd probably best to leave it until after then unless you just want a quick fix. But once those changes are stable, do feel free to message or e-mail me if you want to try and co-ordinate things.

The interfaces for groups are in some ways my least priority at the moment, despite the fact that they're really important, because I know they can be improved easily later whereas the basic infrastructure, we'll only really get one chance at!
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Leonardo Santos -
Hi,

I've just finished that group stuff. But I don't know somethings:
  • I am not used to work with open source and the comunity, so I don't know the standards that it's necessary.
  • In some parts I worked in the way of "copy and paste", there are somethings that I don't know if it's really important.
  • In the log part, I didn't understand everything, but I tried anyway.
Can you help me with this?
Thanks!

smile
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Jonathan Newman -
Hi Juliette,

I'm glad to hear that quite a bit of changes to groups are expected in 1.8. Several projects that I'm aware of have needs to enhance group functionality, so I'm wondering, what are the likely infrastructural changes for groups in 1.8?

If it's not too late to consider them, here are two requests for groups features:
1. A "global group" which can be present all courses, or selected courses.
2. The ability to store and retrieve a group membership history. This would be particularly useful in retreiving grades for a group after they have unenroled from a course.

Is there a chance these could be added in 1.8?

Cheers,
Jonathan


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Juliette Culver

Re: Possible groups features?

by Richard Fysh -

We are an English Independent School and therefore pupils are heavily "setted" in lots of different subjects.  It would be great if teachers could create the list of groups for a course but pupils then select their group or set - it would save us a huge amount of time putting them into groups. 

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Richard Fysh

Re: Possible groups features?

by Rick Barnes -
Pupils can self enrol into a group within a course using a group enrolement key.
If you wanted pupils to select their group you could gilve the pupils a list of group enrolement keys they could choose from with or without guidance.
Or you could put group descriptions and enrolement keys in teh course description so pupis could make their own choices when they want to join a course.

Rick.
Average of ratings: -