LibAnswers: Brightspace for Staff

How to set up the groups

1. Within the Brightspace module, select ‘Communications’ from the Navbar.
2. Select ‘Groups’.
3. Create a category for the groups that you are about to create. Select ‘New Category’. You might have separate categories for tutorial groups, book groups, and so on. Students can be part of multiple groups within one module.
4. Input the category name and a description.
5. Choose the enrolment type. This is where you can choose, for example, whether students decide on their groups or whether you do. 
   • # of Groups – No Auto Enrolments – this is for when you know how many groups you want, and will put the students into each group manually.
   • Groups of # - this is for when you know how many students should go in each group. The number of groups will then depend on how many students are enrolled. Brightspace will allocate the students automatically.
   • # of Groups – this is for when you know how many groups you want and Brightspace will allocate the students automatically.
   • Groups of #, self-enrolments – this is for when you know how many students should go in each group. They can self-enrol to a group, but if a group is full, students would need to select a different group.
   • # of groups, self-enrolments – this is for when you know how many groups you want. They can self-enrol to a group, so you might end up with groups of different sizes.
   • # of groups, capacity of #, self-enrolment – this is for when you know how many groups you want and how many students you want in each group, but you still want students to be able to select their own groups.
6. The next option will change based on your preference for enrolment type. You’ll input either the number of groups, the number of students per group, or both.
7. Input the ‘Group Prefix’. This will go before the number of each group within the category. For example if you were creating book groups, inputting ‘Book Group’ as the prefix would give you ‘Book Group 1’, ‘Book Group 2’, and so on.
8. In ‘Advanced Properties’, If you have chosen self-enrolment, you can set up a date by which students have to self-enrol. If you have chosen auto-enrolment, you can choose whether new users will be enrolled automatically and whether the groups should be random of alphabetical.
9. In ‘Additional Options’, you can also set up discussions, lockers (for sharing files) or assignments if you wish. If you’ve chosen to set up new discussions or assignments, it will handle that on the next screen.
10. Select ‘save’

How the students self-enrol

1. Within the Brightspace module, select ‘Communications’ from the Navbar.
2. Select ‘Groups’.
3. Select ‘View available groups’
4. They can then select from the groups that have space.
5. If they go back to ‘Groups’, they’ll find links to their discussion threads and also their locker (shared files area).

How to target announcements to one or more groups

1. Create your announcement as you normally would.
2. Towards the bottom, under ‘Additional Release Conditions’, select ‘Create and Attach’.
3. In the ‘Condition Type’ dropdown menu, find ‘Group Enrolment’
4. It will then load a dropdown menu for the groups. Select the group that you want the announcement to be viewed by.
5. Select create.
6. Post the announcement.

Note: you could add multiple release conditions for the same announcement. I.e. both groups 1 and 2 to view the announcement.