Hi Jon,
Actually this is wrong I'm afraid. The Groups, and Groupings settings are separate and co-existent. They serve different purposes.
Essentially a Grouping is a collection of Groups.
Take the case where you create groups in a course for different purposes:
- a set of 4 groups according to their allocation to tutor groups in real life;
- a set of 10 groups for a group work project; and
- a set of 5 groups according to their allocation in a lab.
In these cases, if you were to use any of group settings on their own in, for example, a Moodle forum, then the students would each be in three groups (one for each set). They would have a list of groups which contained all three of these sets, and would be able to post to all three. Chances are they would often post in the wrong group for the wrong project.
The Groupings functionality solves this problem by allowing you to create a Grouping of the relevant groups. So you'd create groupings for:
- Weekly tutorships;
- Group work project
- Lab work
When you setup a Moodle activity to use these groups, you can then select the relevant Grouping, and only the groups allocated to that grouping will be shown.
Hope that this clarifies things,
Andrew