Groups in Blackboard - Frequently Asked Questions

You can use the Groups feature in Blackboard to allow students to collaborate on projects, assignments, quizzes or any other collaboration-based course work. This feature provides private areas that students can use for discussions, chats, file sharing and quick email access among group members.

Yes.  The tools available through the Groups feature area are very similar to the tools that are available at the “course” or "whole class" level. Also, please note that there are three ways that students can join a group:

• Self Enrollment: This option allows the students themselves to become members of groups by using sign-up sheets that the faculty can create for each group.
• Manual Enrollment: This option requires the faculty to select each member one at a time from a list of all the students in the course.
• Random Enrollment: This option is best suited for multiple groups, whereby the faculty allows the system to divide up all the members of the course among all the groups based on criteria chosen by the faculty (as, for example, a certain number of students per group).

As faculty member, you can contribute to the group discussion forums and send e-mails to group members. You will also have the ability to view activity within a group without actually being added to the group.

The easiest way to move a student from one group to another is to first remove (i.e. un-enroll) the student from the original group, and then add that student to the correct group. Please note that all information connected to that student will be lost once you remove him/her from the original group.