In a prior post, we looked at how to make groups manually in Moodle. In this post, we will look at two additional features in making groups and they are

• The Auto-group feature
• The Grouping feature

Making Auto-Groups

Auto-groups allows you to have Moodle make groups based on a criteria you give it. If the  characteristics of the groups doesn’t matter that is a fast convenient way to put students in groups. Below are the steps

1. After logging in and going to a course where you have administrative privilege go to course administration->users->groups. If you do this correctly you should see the following

2. Click on Auto-Create Groups and you will see the following

3. The page is mostly self explanatory. Groups can be formed based on the number of groups you want or the number of people per group. Group formation can also be limited by role in the class or by last name, ID, etc. Before groups are finalized you can use the preview button to look at the potential groups. Below is an example of a completed group formation

The auto-group feature made 12 groups and the names of the members are listed in the table. Once you are satisfied you click submit and return to the previous page

Using Groupings

Groupings allows you to place several groups into a “grouping” this allows you to add several groups to an activity at once. In order to use groupings you must first make groups which we have already done. Just like with the group feature in which the same person can be a member of several groups so can one group be a member of several groupings. Below are the steps to making groupings

1. On the groups page, click on grouping and you will see the following

2. Click on  create grouping and you will see the following

3. We will give the grouping a name and click save changes and this will send you to the previous page shown below

4. To add a group to the grouping, you need to click on the people icon under the edit column and you will see the following

5. Now we will pick several groups to add to our grouping and click add as shown below

6. When you are done adding groups you click on back to groupings to finish the process as shown below

Conclusion

We now know how to make groups manually and automatically. We also know how to create groupings. However we have not yet learn how to actually using groups and or groupings in Moodle learning experiences. This will be a topic of a future post