Hi all,
we are on the latest Moodle and I referred to the Moodle Docs and this old discussion for reference.
However, I have a scenario that is not covered in the docs and that seems impossible to implement.
I have two types of groups in the same course: one set of groups for administrative purposes and course orchestration and another set for collaboration. All students are assigned into administrative groups during course enrollment. The collaboration is optional and my students are allowed to work individually if they like. Now, I want to allow them to submit to assignments as either as individuals if they don't belong to a group or as group members if they are part of a collaborative group.
To achieve this, I configured the assignments' group submission settings to
- Submit in groups: yes (so group submissions are possible)
- Require group to make submission: no (so individuals can submit too)
- Require all group members submit: no
- Grouping for student groups: "Collaboration" (to accept only the collaborative working groups)
I use the grouping feature to separate the groups and use grouping filter in group submissions for the assignments. However, with this setting all individual members are assigned to a catch all group and cannot submit separate solutions. Which is not only completely counter intuitive but also I never encountered such course organisation in my practice (which includes my own teaching as well as supporting the educational design of professors in higher ed for 2 decades).
Without grouping, the administrative groups interfere with the course orchestration, which they must not.
In short: individual learners cannot submit their assignments if group submissions are allowed.
In theory, I could assign the individuals to separate groups to catch this. In practice, this implies unnecessary overhead for me as a teacher, which as a byproduct makes the course organisation even more cumbersome than it already is, because about half of my 280 students choose to work individually.
Is there a reasonable solution without adding fake groups to solve this common and simple scenario?
Otherwise, shouldn't this behaviour be considered as a bug?
Christian