Please note: Due to continual Blackboard updates, you may notice slight differences in color theme and other appearance features when comparing the screenshots below to what you see in Blackboard.

Blackboard Groups are versatile tools that can be used for anything from scheduling assignments to facilitating long-term collaborative projects.

You can create groups or group-sets.

• Groups are useful for voluntary or selective assignments, meetings, or collaboration where only a sub-set of the class will participate.
• Group-sets will divide the entire class based on the number of groups or group size that you determine

You can determine group membership in three different ways.

• Let your students self-enroll.
• Have Blackboard create random groups.
• Choose group members yourself.

From here, there are many tools available to facilitate group work and communication between group members.

Q: What can I use groups and group-sets for?

A: Lot’s of things! Here are just a few examples:

Groups:

• Scheduling. Let’s say you have invited students to an optional enrichment event, like a field trip or lecture, and you want to know who is coming and communicate with attendees. You can create a self-enrolling group for the event.
• Small group assignments or communications. Expanding on the previous example, you could also use the event group page to email those who plan to attend with directions or last minute changes of plan, or create attendees-only forums where they can share their reactions.  Group members could email each other to organize car-pools, upload and share photos or documents, or respond to each other’s blog or forum posts after the event.

Group-sets:

• Scheduling. Group-sets can be used to divide the class into a number of small groups. This is a handy way to schedule presentations, discussion leaders, or other assignments that take place outside of class times, such as labs or individual meetings with the instructor. Each group can be named as a time-slot or date, and students can sign-up for a spot by enrolling in whichever group works well for their schedule.  This function can be especially useful for larger classes where working out schedules in class would be too time-consuming or complicated.
• Small group assignments or communications. The most robust use of Blackboard group-sets is to facilitate long-term collaborative assignments. Any of the tools that you use for the entire class can instead be added to group pages.  For example, say you have small groups of students conducting a research project together throughout the semester.  They can use the group page to share files, email each other, schedule meeting times, create blog or forum entries, and keep track of individual tasks.  You can track their progress throughout the semester by monitoring or grading the content of their group page.\

Q: How do I create a group on Blackboard?

1. Log into Blackboard at blackboard.wustl.edu.
2. Click on the title of your course in the My Course
3. Find Users and Groups in the Course Management section in the menu on the left.
4. Click the small arrow to expand the Users and Groups menu; then click Groups. 
5. Click Create to expand the menu at the top.

The first thing you need to decide is whether to create a Group or a Group-set.

Let’s start with Groups.

If you select random enroll, Blackboard will select the number of members you specify randomly from the entire class. If you select self-enroll, your students will be able to sign up for the group. If you select manual enroll, you will determine enrollment.  Let’s start with self-enroll.

Self-enroll Group

1. Create a group name and description.
2. Decide whether or not the group page will be visible to group members, or only to you. You can also choose “sign-up sheet only” if you are using the group only for the purpose of determining group
   • Ex. You might make a group that is called “Optional Viewing of Documentary, Wednesday 7pm” or “Field Trip to Art Museum.”  For these, it would make sense to check the “sign-up sheet only” bubble.p membership or scheduling.
   • ** If you use the sign-up sheet only bubble, students will not be able to check whether or not they have successfully signed up or see who else has signed up, because they will not be able to access the group page. If you are using the group tool for scheduling, but you want  students to be able to see who else has signed up, just check the Yes bubble, but don’t include any other tools in the group.  The Group page will then be just a list of people who have signed up.
3. Next, you can customize the tools that are available for group members. Which of these tools you use depends on the purpose of the group.  More information about how they work can be found on other help-sheets.  They work the same way within groups, except only group members can see and modify content.
   
4. Since this is a self-enrolling group, you must include a sign up sheet. If you don’t care how many people enroll, leave the “Maximum number of members” box blank, or use this box to cap membership.
5. Select “Show members” if you want students to be able to see who else has signed up.
6. Select “Allow students to sign-up from the groups listing page” if you are not planning on adding a link to the group elsewhere (Instruction on how to link group pages below!)
7. Click Submit.

Q: How do students access the group page?

1. If you don’t create a link, they will find the group page or sign-up sheet by scrolling down to Users and Groups and clicking on the groups link.
2. For a self-enrolling group or group or group-set, this will take them to the sign-up sheet. They click “Sign up” to enroll.
3. Once they sign up, they will have access to the group page, which will contain any tools that you chose when you created the group.
4. You might instead choose to create a link in the course menu to make it easier for students to find the group page.
5. Click the + sign at the top of the menu on the left.
6. Select Course Link.
7. Click “Browse,” and select the name of the group or group-set you want to link from the pop-up menu.
8. Name the link and click submit.
9. A link directly to the group page will now appear in the course menu.

Q: How do I create a group-set?

For this example, we’ll use a random enroll group set.  This is helpful for dividing the class into groups in an impartial way.

1. Click on Groups under Users and Groups in the menu on the left hand side, then click Create and select Group-set > Random enroll (See above).
2. The set-up page works the same way as for groups (see above), except that you need to specify how many groups you want OR how many members should be in each group, and select a method for distributing remainder if you know you want groups of a certain size, select Number of Students per Group bubble and then fill in the group size in the box.
   
3. Alternatively, if you don’t care how big the groups are but you only want a certain number of groups, select the Number of Groups bubble and fill in the box.
4. When you click Submit, Blackboard will display a list of groups within your group set. You can rename or edit the individual groups by hovering over the group name, then clicking the small grey arrow that appears next to it.
5. On the group-set list page, you will see how many members are enrolled in each group, how they were enrolled, and whether or not the group is available (which means students can view it).
6. You can add a link to a group-set to the course menu using the same steps reviewed above for groups.