Moodle Groups and Groupings

Moodle groups and groupings provide a way to arrange and rearrange students into different groups for activities, manage access to resources, and manage students. 

The groups and grouping terminology can be confusing. To help clarify, we define them as follows: 

Groups 

A group is a collection of users in the Moodle site (e.g., the individual students enrolled in a tutorial group in your subject). Some groups are automatically created with data from SMP (Student Management Package) via the setup of the Subject site. 

You can create additional groups within Moodle, as well as using the Group-self Selection activity to allow students to create and join their own groups.

Groupings 

A grouping is a collection of groups in a Moodle site. Groupings can be particularly useful for bulk managing student access to activities or resources, communications or facilitating student group work and assignment submissions, particularly for groups created outside of SMP.

For example, a grouping could be created that contains all of the tutorial groups that run at a certain campus. 

Why? 

Organising students within an online learning environment provides an effective way to manage cohorts, activities and resources. 

Using the groups and grouping functionality in a Moodle site can be useful to: 

• Facilitate group work in Moodle. 
• Filter the results of activities, completion data, or the Gradebook for a single class or tutorial group. 
• Restrict access to activities and/or resources to groups (e.g., tutorials, labs, practical groups, RA students etc.). 
• Allow students to create their own groups for an activity or assessment. 
• Separate a discussion forum to create areas for small-group communication.