Small Groups

Do students work in small groups in your class? If so, you can set up a small group for them on Canvas, too! They can have discussions in their groups and submit their assignments as group.

• A Canvas Group gives students their own area of Canvas to collaborate via a private discussion, shared documents, etc. While this area of Canvas is not viewable by students outside the group, you as the instructor will always be able to access it. 
• Canvas Groups also provide great options for grading group assignments. When an assignment is designated as a group assignment, one student makes an online submission and that submission is automatically applied to all students in that group.
• This Groups Overview video for Instructors is a basic overview of how groups work. (4:52)

The Instructor Guides for Student Groups include more than a dozen how-to articles, including the following: 

• How do I automatically assign students to groups? 
• How do I manually assign students to groups? 
• How do I create self sign-up groups in a group set?
• How do I move a student into a different group?

Group Assignments

Grading and providing feedback will be a lot easier if you set up assignments appropriately in Canvas. When you mark an assignment as a group assignment, only one student needs to submit. You have the option of giving the same score to all students in the group or giving each student an individual score.

To learn more about setting up group assignments, please refer to the Canvas tutorial: How do I assign an assignment to a course group? If you run into any trouble setting up your group assignments, Canvas help is available 24/7.

Group Discussions

Canvas allows for whole-class and small-group discussions. In a small-group discussion, students can only interact with students in their own group. You can see all the groups, but students can only see theirs.

To learn more about setting up group discussions, please refer to the Canvas tutorial: How do I create a group discussion in a course? If you run into any trouble setting up your group assignments, Canvas help is available 24/7.