Hi there.
I'm currently working on extending Moodle's group functionality for Dublin City University's Moodle site, hopefully with a view to making it a bit more useful for teachers here. The idea behind this project is that groups will be made more workable for tutorials, projects etc, especially for large classes.
The main features of the system are:
- Support for multiple group "projects" running concurrently within a course, ie students can join seperate groups for different projects, or join a group associated with a class practical / tutorial on a specific day etc.
- Support for "meta-groups" within a specific group project. This is useful for courses where there are large class sizes but small group sizes, so that groups can be bundled together.
- Three different methods for joining a group. Students can be assigned by a teacher (as at present), can join a group themselves or can be assigned automatically. The automatic assignment adds students to groups with the lowest number of members, until the minimum required group size has been met. Combinations will also be supported, ie an editing teacher can override a student or the system's own allocations and put them in a different group.
- Minimum and maximum group sizes, as well as a definable timeframe within which students will be able to join a group.
- Group locking by students (option as defined by lecturer). Students can prevent anyone else from joining a group so long as they have met the minimum group size. Of course this can be overridded by an editing teacher.
- Private group creation (option as defined by lecturer). Students can create their own group (say for a project) and place a password on it. This will ensure that only those they want can join a team. If the minimum number of students have not joined one of these groups after a period of time defined by the lecturer the group will be deleted.
- A short text description of a group can be posted on the view groups page. This can be edited by members of a group. This is handy should a group require a certain type of new member ie one from a particular class or discipline.
- Reports will be available to the teacher that owns the course based on group composition by student name, meta-group name, group name etc. These will be available in Excel and text formats.
One thing that has been mentioned to me that we're not including is editing privileges for non-editing teachers within a group or meta-group. It would be nice but we haven't the time to implement that at present.We should be starting testing of this within a week or two.
If you want to know more about the project or have any queries/rants etc then drop me a mail at my address. I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
Regards,Rob H.
