Brent Warner 0:00
Group work is great, but it’s not always clear how to get things going on a digital platform. What are the options to make useful group assignments in Canvas? This is the HigherEdTech Podcast, season six, Episode 16.

Tim Van Norman 0:19
Tim, welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:35
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:43
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So back from spring break, yeah, into that final push towards the end of the semester.

Brent Warner 0:52
Yeah, yeah. And so I think this is a good time to talk about, you know, I know a lot of teachers are starting to get like, finals, projects, groups, projects, all sorts of things like that. I’m doing some of that too. And Tim, you and I talked to earlier today, you helped me kind of reset up some of the things I’ve done before in the past, but kind of forgot how to do and so we thought, hey, let’s talk about group work and group assignments, and the ins and outs of, you know, some of the technical side of this, if, if other people are like me and kind of like, I know what to do, but I kind of don’t know what to do.

Tim Van Norman 1:25
This is a conversation I’m having quite a bit right now. It completely makes sense myself. The last half of the semester, I have my students do a group work, online, asynchronous class, and they’re doing group work. So yeah, it’s, it’s been a fun thing. And so, yes, I, when you mentioned it, I thought it was a great idea.

Brent Warner 1:46
Alright, well, we got a lot to get into, and not a ton of time. So let’s, let’s get right to it.

Tim Van Norman 1:53
So first of all, we’ll get into all kinds of aspects of groups as we go through this, I think. But let’s talk about how to start setting up a group. There’s two ways in Canvas, and they’re very similar. The first is to go into most people go into an assignment, and they go, oh, I want to make this a group assignment. You click to make a group assignment, and you name the group assignment, and then you just keep on going. You create the assignment. Okay, that’s the first way, the second way. Or once you’ve done that, then you need to go into people, under people, you can create a group, but it’s a little bit weird in how you do it, because you need to name the group of assignments, and then you have to create the groups under that group,

Brent Warner 2:41
yeah. So you create a bigger category, like, what? What’s your bigger goal here right now and then, like, I have right now we’re doing reading circles in my class, so I’ve got my reading circles category, and then I had to make group A, group B, Group C, Group D, or whatever it is, down the line,

Tim Van Norman 2:58
Exactly. So I’ve got Shark Tank pitch that they’re going to do at the end of the semester. So I have it the Shark Tank Group, and then the different products, or the names that they’ve called themselves, are the names of the individual groups under there. So same thing, you get to put things together. So in people, it’s really easy to set it up. You tell it how many groups you want. You can always add another group. You tell it how many students you want in the group, and that you want Canvas automatically make it or you want to maximize the number of students, or whatever you want to do. There’s a lot of different things, really easy. And then you can drag and drop the people into the group. You can have Canvas automatically set up the groups. Whatever you want to do there, you can even have the students go in and set their own groups.

Brent Warner 3:46
Yeah, that was the one. I haven’t done that yet, but I was going to ask about it. So when you do it, where the students create their own groups, you still set up like, lettered groups, you know, like, hey, I want to have 10 empty groups. And then you just ask students to go and put themselves into whichever one they want. Is that how it works? Yep.

Tim Van Norman 4:05
And then you that’s when you really want to make sure you set the maximum number of students in a group, okay, okay. Otherwise, you could get literally all of your students in one group.

Brent Warner 4:16
Okay, so if they’re, if they happen to be, for example, in person, and you say, Hey, you guys are you guys figure out what groups you are, and then go in. And I know that there’s maximum of three students per group. Then then you guys just go find a spot to slide yourself in exactly.

Tim Van Norman 4:32
Okay. So the nice thing is for them to do that once you’ve set up the groups and saved it, and if you say that it’s self enrolled, then on the left in the Canvas navigation, it comes up and says groups. The students click on Groups, and then they can assign themselves to the group.

Brent Warner 4:52
However, can you lock it? Or can you lock it after they’ve put themselves in so they don’t just keep moving themselves around? Yes.

Tim Van Norman 4:59
Okay. You just turn that off. Okay, when you’re ready. Absolutely no that. It’s a very important question. However, once they are set up and everybody’s in their groups and stuff like, stuff like that, then and especially, that’s why you want to lock it is because then they lose access to the other groups if they, if they, once they are assigned to a group and it still on the left hand side in Canvas is where they see groups, and they click on that and they can see their groups, all the groups that they’re in in any classes, all shows up in the one spot. Okay, okay, okay, so the reason that Canvas does that is because it creates this concept of group communication, so they kind of get their own little Canvas shell to work in. So this, I don’t see how this works. Really well at the higher ed level, you’ve got 16 weeks, but 16 weeks is really short when you’re teaching, if you were teaching for a whole year, I could see where this could be really useful. 16 weeks might be a little bit short, though, but you literally give them a complete shell. That means they can create their own discussions, they can create their own pages. They can create their own communication within for each other. All within that, the inbox includes their ability to communicate within their group. Their group shows up as an option to just send messages to everyone in this group. Okay, great. Um, all of that stuff. It’s all broken in now another little plug for a third party. Uh, pronto. Pronto. Can be you have the option of setting that up to include groups or not include groups. Yeah, pronto, they can have that conversation as well. So it’s a really neat tool for that.

Brent Warner 6:50
So we’ve talked about pronto. It’s been several years, but we’ve had it active. And so for anyone who doesn’t know what pronto is that is kind of like having a little tiny discord. Pop up chat in your shell. It’s all organized by your canvas setup, so it’s quite nice. And then I just had a student actually ask about it this week too, in my in one of my other classes, and he said, Hey, can we have some ways for us to, like, set up group took conversations outside of class. And I said, yeah. So let’s pop in the Pronto. You’ve already got your groups, and then I showed them just in class. I said, By the way, you can click on the video camera option, so so your groups are already in there, and you can go, instead of having to have your 40 minute free zoom version, right? You can have your you can just jump into pronto and have your own meetings inside of there. And by the way, you can record them and use those for assignments as well. So depending on what you’re trying to do, there’s a lot of interesting options for groups group like live chats and conversations with Pronto.

Tim Van Norman 7:50
Absolutely, and for the teachers out there. I mean, I know that’s a lot of the the majority of our listeners. You in Pronto, you can determine whether or not, you’re going to actually be part of the group as well. So you can then go in and see what they were talking about, if you want that’s, it’s a really nice feature that’s that’s built into pronto. So we’ll get, I’ll get into some other tips later on how to do some communication within groups. But let’s move on a little bit and talk about discussions versus assignments and how you use groups, okay? Because this is, this is where it gets really key and nuanced, a discussion. In this case, when I say assignment, I do not mean discussion, okay, okay, the discussion can be graded, okay, but on purpose not calling it

Brent Warner 8:47
Sorry, discussion meaning – not discussion board? you’re just saying…

Tim Van Norman 8:50
Discussion board -what Canvas calls a Discussion,

Brent Warner 8:51
Okay,

Tim Van Norman 8:51
okay, so when you say that this is a group discussion, that means that the discussion is within the group, okay? They are not discussing outside of the group. Okay, okay, so I’m gonna give a danger right away in this one, and I’m gonna talk about dangers often in this, if you like, literally happened just a couple weeks ago. If you set up your groups and people add after the fact, or they’re not in a group, then when they have the discussion that’s within a group, they don’t see anything because they ‘re not part of a group,

Brent Warner 9:37
even if they get added after they…

Tim Van Norman 9:40
Until they’re added.

Brent Warner 9:41
Okay, okay,

Tim Van Norman 9:42
then they will, but not historically,

Brent Warner 9:45
okay, okay.

Tim Van Norman 9:46
So basically, maintain your groups,

Brent Warner 9:50
All right. So you need to make sure that they’re in the group so that they can see everything that’s going on. That also excludes people who are not in the group from seeing any. Thing that’s happening, or any conversations that’s happening inside of one given group, exactly.

Tim Van Norman 10:05
And in discussions, everybody gets their own grade. Okay, individual that individually, that is important when we talk about assignments, so I’m gonna be real specific on that. So discussions, they see their own grade. The discussion is within that group. So by the way, for instance, if you’ve got multiple classes that are cross listed together multiple sections, this is a great way to have those discussions and stuff broken out into the different areas. Okay, so just lots of different ways to use groups, but that’s a nice common way as well. So that’s discussions. Now let’s step into assignments, because now it gets more complicated. We have something called group assignments. So literally, you click on the group once you’re using an LTI, you cannot certain LT eyes will not allow you to use group assignments, such as Google assignments.

Brent Warner 10:56
Yes, this is a frustration for me. Constantly.

Tim Van Norman 11:00
Exactly, yeah. So…

Brent Warner 11:03
So let’s, let’s be clear on what that means. So if I have all of my reading circles right, and I want my students to do interactions with a Google assignment, and in, you know, Google doc inside of that, I cannot click on the group, basically, as soon as I load the External Tool Option, and it comes and I set up my Google assignment. What happens inside of Canvas is the option for make this a group discussion disappears. It’s just gone. And so then you and I did this earlier today. We went back, and we’re like, Okay, back to No, no outside, no external assignment, and then the group option turned back on, so it’s literally recognizing, hey, you have a Google tool here. This cannot be used for or you have Google, Google assignment inside of this, this cannot be used for a group assignment. Exactly, okay. It is frustrating, but we did find a workaround, but, but it’s frustrating as it is.

Tim Van Norman 11:58
Oh, and that, that workaround, I don’t know that. I want to bring it up as for as complicated as it is. Well, I’ll

Brent Warner 12:04
say the talk about them though. Yeah, we should let people know because, because they might want to do it right. And so yeah.

Tim Van Norman 12:10
If you know about it ahead of time, you can make the decision, rather than us making the decision for you. So yes, we’ll get into that in a minute. Okay, but a group assignment. Understand a couple things about it. Number one, there’s an option. It a group assignment means one submission for the group, okay, well, the discussion not like discussions. Discussions is discussions within a group. And each plural assignment, right? Okay, and each student submits their own in assignments, a group assignment is one submission for the group. Right now, there is an option for individually grading the submissions, meaning each student can have a different grade, but you but they’ve based on one submission, right?

Brent Warner 12:59
So this is a case I’ve done this before in the past, where it’s like, hey, they’re submitting a presentation, and they’re also getting graded on their presentation skills. And so maybe all the students got the same grade on the quality of the slide deck that they built, for example, because they built that all together, and that was a shared submission, so that’s one part of it, but I also know that each student had different skills, quality in their actual presentation. And so maybe, you know, all students get five points, for example, for the the quality of the presentation, but then other ones got two or three or one or an extra five for their actual speaking skills? Yes.

Tim Van Norman 13:43
So that is a great example. Now I’m going to give two different hints, and they’re going to seem like I’m hinting two opposite ways, because I am. Okay, so here’s, here’s the first hint. One. Set it up as a group, grade, and grade the whole group based on the first part, and then go back change it to be individual grade and grade everybody individually for the second part. However, if you do that, then you have your grading twice, and you have to have grade all of the submissions for all of them first, before you go back in and give the individual grades.

Brent Warner 14:28
Yeah, no. Pain. Yeah. Pain. And also, I, I’m not sure about when you do this, but when you send back grades, does it go back immediately to them and then they start seeing their grades shift up and down, if they’re happen to be watching, or is there like a time limit of a grace period before they get notified?

Tim Van Norman 14:46
There’s a grace period of about a half a second?

Brent Warner 14:49
Oh, wow. That’s easy (laughter)

Tim Van Norman 14:51
In the grade book, you can say, though. And this, I use this literally all the time for this. You know, when I’m doing i. Grading papers or something, where it’s going to be. I want to hold on to the grade and then some give it to them later. You can say to manually post grades for that one assignment. Okay? And then it holds them until you post them at the end.

Brent Warner 15:16
Okay, so it’s waiting, waiting, waiting, and you’re making your investments. And then you go in,

Tim Van Norman 15:20
right? So you have to now in grade book, though, in the grade book is where you do that. You make that change. Now, notice I said it’s a suggestion, but you actually have to grade everything twice. Here’s the other suggestion, make it all individual grades. The downside is you now need to keep track of what all the groups are and figure out the two parts and keep track of that. But you’re you’re grading everybody, but you’re only grading them once.

Brent Warner 15:52
Now has conversations about, I feel like there were conversations in the past about being able to have, like, multi part grades, or like, drafted grades, or something like that, where it’s like, hey, part one and part two, and we do these differently. Is that, is that ever become a thing, or is that conversation not happening,

Tim Van Norman 16:09
That is coming up with regard to discussion checkpoints, okay, but I have not heard of it in assignments yet, okay. But So one way you can do that, by the way, is rubrics. Set up a rubric for this is the part that’s going to be the group part, and this is the part that’s going to be the individual part, and grade that rubric and then come back in and but again, do you keep track of it ahead of time, or do you grade everything twice? So just understand, and by the way, I don’t have the answer to either one of those because I did it wrong the first time. Okay, so I’m gonna try a different way, you know, but the first one, I did the I grade everybody as a group, and then I had several people who submitted late, and other people who, some people in the group, got different grade than others, and so I changed it in the middle, and that just got to be really confusing. So that’s why I’m saying, choose one way and stick with it, but make sure you get all of the grading done a certain way before you make changes. Okay, got it? It just gets really confusing. So

Brent Warner 17:27
For sure. I’m already confused. (laughter)

Tim Van Norman 17:30
So yeah, absolutely – And I hate to be confusing that way, but it is. It’s one of those things where you really have to sit down and figure out what it means, right? And try it even, and

Brent Warner 17:39
And then, like once you’ve kind of built the way that you want to do it, you have a better grasp of it. But when you’re kind of talking about an abstract or trying to set it up for the very first time, it is like there is a learning curve, for sure, absolutely.

Tim Van Norman 17:49
So the other part is that you can assign an assignment based on a group Okay, okay, so what I’m what am I talking about? You not making it a group assignment, but you can say this group has this assignment assigned to it during this time period. Okay, so for instance, let’s say you’ve got three groups, and they’re going to do first group is going to do assignment one, two, and then three. The second group’s gonna do assignment two, three and then one and the third. Group’s gonna do three, one and two in that order. Okay, so the first week, group one is gonna have one, number one do, group two is gonna have number two do. Group three is gonna have number three do, and then rotate through, and then rotate through. Okay, you can actually have it all be one assignment of assignment. One is the same for all of them, but different due dates depending on the group. And you do that with the assigned to the assigned to, yes. So this is what I did. This is my, my workaround, right? Yeah, okay, remember, you can’t use Google assignments to do this

Brent Warner 19:00
well, except you can, because you can assign to individual students, not to groups,

Tim Van Norman 19:07
right? And so, but you’re not using it as the group, that’s right? And so that becomes the weird, hard part, because you have to, now you set up every student and what they’re going to do in every assignment, yes, individually.

Brent Warner 19:22
To be clear, how I did it today was I have six groups of four students per group. I did it as assigned to. I kept separately on a piece of paper open. I said, Hey, here so I don’t so I can remember which students are in which groups. And I went to Group A and then I said, Okay, you know, whatever the names of those students are, student one, Student Two, student three, student four. And then, and then I did the same thing all the way down the line. Now the nice thing I will say, I mean, it’s not, it’s not wonderful, but it, but it’s a nice semi solution is that once you have made a little. Election, and you keep doing the thing down the line, it remembers that previous selection of students or the previous selection of activities. So I’ve noticed this is a newer thing inside of Canvas, which is it keeps a little bit of a brief memory based on the last thing that you did. And so if you’re repeating that process over and over again, I was like, oh, okay, I don’t have to do that one that, at least picking every student each time around. So that was nice and

Tim Van Norman 20:25
and remember, you can have different modules and assign the module to a group of students, yes, as well. So

Brent Warner 20:33
So to be

Tim Van Norman 20:35
but again, you can also do what I did, right? You can’t do group groups in modules, yet, cannot assign a module to a group yet that I’m told that they that was something that, when they did the Assign allowing us to assign individuals to modules, every went excellent. Now, can we do groups? So so they they realize that they’ve got to have that one coming. So understand this is a complicated we’re trying to simplify a very complicated topic here. But so you can, you can have group assignments, or you can assign an assignment to a group. Yes, two different think of it as two different things.

Brent Warner 21:14
I wish the phrasing was different, right? So these are the things we’re always talking about like tech engineers naming things in just the worst possible ways is really not helpful to understand that they sit up here, but, but yes, okay, so you’re saying group assignments means that is the whole group doing one thing and being graded as a group, and then The assignments to groups means you could individually grade everybody, but they go out to the group members as they’re getting it right.

Tim Van Norman 21:46
So, yes, exactly, exactly. So that said, one of the banes of our existence in Canvas is the concept of peer review. Okay, all I can say is, Canvas doesn’t have it right. The second thing I’ll say about that is I don’t know what right is. I just know that the way it is isn’t right. Okay, so I’m not giving a suggestion for how to fix the problem. I am saying I don’t like the way it’s fixed right now, yeah, depending on what you have set up, there’s various things that will and won’t work with regard to peer review, okay? And I think we’ll probably do a peer review podcast as well coming up, yeah, just because there’s so many nuances in that, understand that when you’re going to do a peer review. Have a lot of grace for your students, please, especially when you do group work, because it’s not going to work the way you expect it to. Okay? And that’s just kind of a statement.

Brent Warner 22:55
Stay tuned for the next episode when we talk all about peer reviews. Oh yeah,

Tim Van Norman 22:58
absolutely okay.

Brent Warner 23:01
So yeah, that is its own set of issues. Inside of the peer reviews, it’s doable. There are things that can be done, but it might not be what you’re trying to set up for, what you’re thinking about immediately. So yes, actually, do really stay tuned for an upcoming episode on that, or reach out to your own instructional technologies and say, Okay, this is what I’m trying to do. How do I do it? It’s

Tim Van Norman 23:23
one of the few times when people like me like the fact that I’m teaching and and I actually can demonstrate how this works, because it’s so confusing. So yes, we’re gonna, we’re definitely gonna do an episode on peer reviews. Okay,

Brent Warner 23:41
mark it down. Mark it down so we don’t forget maybe even the next episode.

Tim Van Norman 23:44
Might be the way to do it. Yes, absolutely okay.

Brent Warner 23:47
So I think this is kind of the big get. Gets to the big points inside of group work, group assignments. I hope we covered kind of everything going on inside of here. Tim, is there anything that we missed for right now,

Tim Van Norman 24:02
just understand that when you do group work, have grace for your students, just like I was talking about with peer reviews. I have an asynchronous online class, and so one of the things that I did is I know they’re going to have trouble communicating, so I sent them a list of here are suggestions for how to communicate you can and I gave them all things that they can do within the environment. I’ve given them and I said, and anything else. So I gave them pronto. I gave them the Canvas Inbox. I gave them their own shell. I actually went into zoom and I created a separate Zoom meeting for every one of my student groups and scheduled it for the last day of the semester. Oh, nice. And that gave each group their own meeting number. They can meet any time. It’s not scheduled to you. It’s not scheduled for me to have to be there, and it’s not scheduled to record, but since they’re doing the recording at the end, all they have to do is let me know, and I can turn on the recording, and then they can go in and record. Great. Okay, so think creatively about that. Some groups will work over discord, some will work over WhatsApp, some will work over texting. You know, I can understand why students don’t want to share their personal email addresses and personal phone numbers with other students. That all makes sense, so I try to make sure I’ve given them the way of communicating without having one student have to say but I don’t want to give you my phone number. Reality, and it’s valid, Yep, yeah, for sure.

Brent Warner 25:46
Okay, so hopefully that’s some useful information. Get you started. Get get into some of your options for creating groups. I know, you know, it just happens, especially like towards the end of the semester, we’ve said at the beginning. So many people are like, hey, now it’s time for our group activities, our, you know, capstone projects, whatever else it is that we’re doing and so, so take a look, spend a little bit of extra time. I will give the warning that I kind of, I was like, Oh yeah, I forgot about this. And then I really did need, like, an hour or two of really, just like, okay, clicking through and getting everything set up and organized. And so it’s like, a lot of times we get the sense, it’s like, Oh, I could just whip through this and get it done in, you know, 10 or 15 minutes. It’s like, no, no. Make sure you’re really, really giving yourself time, and don’t try to do it right before class. Give yourself a day or two before. So you really are made sure that everything is good, absolutely

Tim Van Norman 26:39
and and understand that you you are going to make some mistakes. Yeah, especially the first couple of times you do it, you’re really going to make some mistakes. Hopefully you learn from them and document them so they don’t make them next time, especially because when you copy semester to semester, the groups don’t copy, yeah,

Brent Warner 27:01
yeah. And that part is tricky too, because it’s like, you start thinking everything’s set up, and it’s like, it’s not set up, so you need to do the work, yep, keep it all in mind. Good luck.

Tim Van Norman 27:15
Thank you for listening today. For more information about the show, please visit our website, at the higher edtech podcast.com

Brent Warner 27:22
as always, we want your feedback, so please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts. For

Tim Van Norman 27:27
everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions or group setting up, please contact IVC technical support or me at Tvannorman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 27:42
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 27:47
I’m Tim Van Norman,

Brent Warner 27:49
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.