Define Group / Group Creation

Course related Groups

Creating group of TAs with collaboration space

Catalina is prepping for the upcoming year and the new Teaching Assistants for Spanish 1 she'll be managing.  She needs to identify who all the TAs are and add them to her "TA knowledge sharing group" which she started 2 years ago. Once she's added them to the group, they'll have access to the collaborative space the group has been using to share information, discuss class details and work on course materials together.  She'll need to let them know when it's available and would like to send out some additional guidelines about the site.  Once invited, the TAs visit the site to get an idea of what they are in for this semester.

Use Cases Included:  Create group, Add members automatically (or manually if not known in SIS or LDAP or other),  Invite members, Send message to members, Find group space

Added by:  Daphne (UCB)

Department instructors share project space

As with many language programs, Spanish I classes share curriculum.  Catalina is excited that the new CLE allows them to have a shared space for sharing and discussing the curriculum.  It's been challenging in the past to track down all the instructors' information and make them participants of home grown web page she created.  In the new system, she can just choose "All Spanish 1 Instructors" and they all get added based on information in the university's official system - very efficient!  Of course, those systems aren't always up to date so on occasion she'll still need to add them manually so they have access until the Student Information System is updated and updates the CLE.  Spanish instructors can even grab course material from the shared space and put it in their course space.   She's been thinking about adding Teaching Assistants to the site too but is concerned since there is often material and conversation that they want to keep private between instructors.

Use Cases Included:  Create group, Implicitly find members for a group, Add members to group - automatically, Explicitly find members for group, Add members to group - manually, Give group collaborative space, Upload content restricted to group, Share a folder or file with all members of a group, ????

Added by:  Daphne (UCB)

Departmental Faculty share "repository" space

A arts and sciences program has created a collection of research materials, reading materials, images, videos and other materials that faculty are encouraged to use in their course curriculum. To share these materials, program administrators have created a single site that allows faculty to browse the materials, and associated examples of their use in teaching context. Different faculty have different access privileges (some may add files to certain locations and others may only view, etc.). To use these materials, Faculty go into their own sites, and browse to the files housed in this common repository to embed links to these shared files through their own course site's web pages. When sharing these files with students, the course membership group already automatically created in a site would inherit the ability to view; at times the faculty members will also add additional ad-hoc members to this "view" group. Students are then encouraged to repurpose and share these materials within their own workspaces; to share with other members of their program students search for their fellow students by name, by course membership, by department membership, and by special interest membership.

International Paired Course

At NYU, they have paired courses in which a group of students takes a language course in NY and a different set of students takes the same class abroad (perhaps Florence for Italian).  They have principle instruction by a professor in thier location.  But the 2 classes share some sessions via videoconferences.  The instructors would like to set up a collaborative space for the shared portion of the class which is some set number of videoconferences.  They'll have shared discussion and common assignments but the assessment will happen from their primary faculty member.  Instructors need to continue to be able to communicate and share content with just their students along with support and engage this larger collaboration during the shared sessions.

Use Cases Included:  

Added by:  NYU use case given by Lucy Appert (entered by Daphne (UCB))

Instructor combines multiple sections of the same course

Kevin teaches three sections of Chem 101, each with approximately 100 students Chemistry 101.  Each section meets twice a week for 90 minutes.  Kevin gives his students a short graded quiz or exercise during each class to encourage attendance and keep his students engaged.  In addition, over the course of the semester, students turn in 16 homework problem sets and take four exams.  Fortunately, Keith has two teaching assistants for each section to assist with grading, answering student questions, and proctoring quizzes and exams.  Even so, the workload associated with teaching this class is considerable.  Keith finds that he can save time and effort by combining his three course sites into a single site.  By combining sites, he cuts his course prep work by approximately two thirds.  Instead of configuring three sites, each with a syllabus, 16 assignments, four exams, and course resources, he only needs to set up and manage a single site.  Keith configures his combined site so that his TAs only see the homework submissions for  students in their own sections.  This helps his TAs manage their workload by showing them only those submissions for which they are responsible.  Also, it prevents his TAs from seeing the grades of students who are not under their charge, which is important for FERPA compliance.  Many of the announcements posted by Keith apply to all three sections, so he only has to post them once and they are immediately available to all of his students.  Occasionally, however, he needs to post an announcement about a specific class meeting that only pertains to one section.  In such cases, he can post the announcement or message for that section only.  Keith especially appreciates the fact that he can review the progress of students in all sections in one place.  He can also filter the submissions and grades by section to determine whether the students in the section need extra help or review on specific topics.  At the end of the semester, when it's time to submit grades to the student information system, Keith is able to to transmit the grades for the students in each section to the grade roster for that section in the SIS because the LMS kept track of the section assignment for each student.

Use Cases Included: combine sections into a single group, limit TA view of submissions and grades to students in their own section, filter grades or submissions by section, post announcements or send message to all or to a specific section.

Added by: Lynn Ward

Instructor uses groups to discourage cheating

Alex, an an adjunct instructor in CS, teaches two online sections of an introductory computer science course for non majors.  All of the course materials, assignments, and exams were prepared by the course coordinator. Alex and the other instructors for this course are expected to use them with little or no modification.  The five exams for the course, which consist of randomly drawn multiple choice and short answer questions, are normally administered during a two-hour window.  Concerned about the possibility of students sharing test questions, the course coordinator has created multiple versions of each exam. Just prior to opening the exam, Alex assigns her students randomly to three groups and assigns a different version of the exam to each group.  Each student can only see and access the version of the exam that has been assigned to his or her group.  Alex, however, can easily access all of the exam results in a single screen or report and all exam grades are sent to a common gradebook for the class. 

Use Cases Included: Create randomly assigned groups, assign an exam or activity to a group, hide an exam or activity from non-group members, send grades for group exam or activity to a common gradebook (and possibly to a common gradebook item)

Added by: Lynn (IU)

Student Project Groups

Instructor coordinates problem-based learning teams

Robin, a professor in the Business School, encourages her students to do a significant amount of group work in her International Business course.  Several problems during a term are introduced to students who then may work in teams of 3-5 and need to pull together information from a variety of resources in order to fully address the problem. Student presentations of their work on the problems may be included.  Since they often won't get to choose their teammates when they are out in the work world, Robin likes to coordinate the teams herself paying some attention to class schedules, and where students live.  Later in the term, a couple problems require each team to have at least one person who has already taken Business Law so she is more concerned with that criteria than the convenience factor when she creates those teams.

More...

Use Cases: Create group containing members with identical capabilities, View profiles of group members (implicit to assigning based on person attributes), Add members to group, ensure all members belong to another category of group, create group metadata, view group metadata, announce group to members, give group collaboration space

Added by:  Daphne Ogle, UCB; based on Georgia Tech's "problem-based learining" use case

A subgroup is formed within an organization to work on a special project

Janet was elected to the student council on an environmental platform. She was selected to chair a subcommittee to improve sustainability practices for all campus events. Four other members of the student council have either been appointed or shown an interest in exploring this issue further. Their goal is to present a concrete proposal to the entire council in three months. They will need to do a lot of collaboration between now and then.

More...

Use cases included: Create a group, Add members, View and change a group member's role, See my groups, View profiles/photos of group members, Remove a member from a group, View and change a group member's role/permission

Added by:  Keli (Stanford)

Instructor creates small student project teams in 30 person course

Sara, the instructor for Rethinking Suburban History, would like to put students into project groups for their final project.  It's midterm so she knows her students their strengths and work habits fairly well.  She could almost just grab them in class and start putting them into groups of 5 but she'd like to organize them in the LMS.  She'd like to see their pictures and perhaps names while creating the groups.  From the group of 30 she will just start putting them into groups.  Since she doesn't have it worked out ahead of time, she'll make changes along the way.  She'll put Tom in group 3 to start with but as the groups get filled out she notices that group 5 could use someone like Tom because of his internship at the Urban Planning Office over the summer.  She moves him from group 3 to group 5.  She can see there are 5 more students that aren't a group yet.  She clearly sees group 5 and 2 are full.  Group 1 needs one more person so she grabs Sally from the group of ungrouped students to Group 1.  She fills the rest of the groups similarly.  Once she's done, she does one last visual check to make sure the groups she's created make sense.  She decides to move Sally to group 3 and Amid to group 1.  Once she's satisfied with the groups, she send notification to the groups to let them know who they'll be working with.  She'll give them time in class next week to work out logistics and get started on their project.

Use cases included: Create a group, Add members, Move member from group to another, See all groups at once

Added by:  Daphne (UCB)

Video

Self-creating student project group & space

Students in "Evaluation of Systems and Services" will work on a group project over the next few weeks.  The instructor would like them to organize themselves around shared interest in a topic.  In class, she allows students with a topic idea to describe their idea and then asks them to start a group in the LMS that other students can join.  Students have until the end of the day tomorrow to sign up for a group or suggest a new one.  They must have 3 people in each group and no more than 5.   Those groups that don't gain the required 3 will have to join another group after tomorrow.

Susan suggested her group evaluate Facebook and she ended up with 5 people joining her group .  She volunteered to set up a project space for the group on their CLE.  All the members shared their email addresses so she'll use them to get them all access to the space.  They'll use the space to share resources, contact information, schedules and materials as they're working on them.  The system will help them keep track of versions as they iterate on their various assignements.  They're also hoping it will help them schedule team meetings and such which is always challenging with their busy and varying schedules.

Use Cases Included: Create joinable group, Join group, Give group collaborative space,  version control of documents, share profile (or subset), schedule meetings (think doodle.com)

Added by:  Daphne (UCB)

Instructor creates equally distributed student groups

Ahmad is teaching a 100-student lecture class this term.  He has 3 TAs who grade all assignments. Each student must complete all of the same assignments. Ahmad needs to divide the class into 3 groups for each assignment, each group comprising different, randomly chosen members. Then he'll randomly assign one of the TAs  to each group and they are responsible for grading the associated assignment (motives might include breaking up TA-student connections, encouraging a demographic balance, or simple convenience.).  After students have submitted their assignment, the TA needs to go into the system and download all the assignments (alernatively they may grade online) for grading.  After they enter the grades in the online gradebook, their responsibility for that particular group is complete.  If a student has a question about grading, the instructor (or TAs) can easily see who the grader was for that assignment for that student.

Use Cases Included:  Create randomly assigned groups, Assign group leader (TA), Download assignments for group,  Enter grades for group, Identify grader

Added by:  Daphne & Oliver (UCB), David (Capetown)

Instructor creates student groups around assignment

Marsh is teaching a 30-student course in which students work in teams to construct conference posters. As it is a pure distance-learning course, he wants to assign students at random to teams. He also wants to generate for each team various team-specific tools that the team members can use for collaboration. These include a separate forum and Resources subdirectory for each team. The students will use these to collaborate on and prepare their posters. When they are ready to submit their posters, the students will upload them both to their Resources subdirectory and the Assignment drop box.  To allow the entire class to view the posters, Sakai would ideally generate a web page with links to the posters, one link per team, or the instructor may have to do this manually.

Use Cases Included: Create randomly assigned groups, give group collaboration space, give group collaboration tools, Upload assignment as a group, Give class access to each other's group assignment

Added by: Daphne (UCB), Marshall Feldman (University of Rhode Island)

Mixed student groups:  partially self-created, partially randomly assigned

I divided students into 38 groups of about 5; they put in a request to me
about which students they wanted to be grouped with, but they also had the
option of having me group them by default if they didn't put in a request.
I then wanted to assign them to individual groups, and the groups function
seemed great to me. But I had some problems/confusion:

* First, I wanted to put all the students who had sent me a request into
specific groups. Then I wanted to take all the remaining students who I had
not yet assigned to a group, folding them into the groups that had fewer
than 5 students. While it was great that I could easily see which groups had
fewer than 5 students and so needed the remaining students assigned to them,
I couldn't easily generate a list or group of the REMAINING students. Wow,
this would be such an important tool to use! Instead, I had to go into each
group and then manually check off the names in each group in an offline
excel sheet I downloaded from the class roster. With 200 students, this
took a very long time. Is there some easy way of generating a list of
students on the roster who are NOT in a group? I couldn't find it if there
was one, and it ultimately took more time to put them into groups online
than if I had just done the whole thing manually (see below also because I
had further problems, continuing my wish I'd just done the whole thing
manually by individual e-mail to students and typing in each of their e-mail
addresses!). 

* Second, I royally screwed up the communication in several ways. I set up
an announcement for each individual group. I had copied their names and
e-mail addresses from the group roster and put them in each announcement
text (because I couldn't understand from the "help" and "how to guides" how
and if the students would/could communicate among themselves via messages on
bspace; I copied names and e-mail addresses into the announcement because I
was worried otherwise they wouldn't be able to get in touch with each other
-- is there some additional help that could be provided that could answer
this question on the website?). In addition, I selected on the announcement
the e-mail notification as high, to all participants. I assumed that this
meant *all participants in the group*! But it went out to all students --
all 38 of my individual group announcements went out to the whole class.
Yikes, I really misunderstood that. [Because of what I had put in the body
of the announcement, it really looked like it was only going to people in
each individual group only!] Perhaps that could also be made more clear (an
asterisk that says, if you select "high priority, all participants" it is
not just for the group you designated above but really does go out to every
single participant on the whole site!). Not only was this pretty
embarrassing but I am worried about privacy issues. While I take
responsibility for this embarrassment and any other consequences, I found
the website help and how-to guides confusing and inadequate on this topic.
If there were other things I could have done, I would appreciate knowing
about it for the future, as I found the "group" tools rather inadequate (or
at least the instructions for it) for the simple task I'd hoped to
accomplish. 

Use Case Included:  assign specific people to a group, see all people not assigned to a certain kind of (or group of) groups,  randomly assign people, set maximum group size, send announcement to group (multiple groups), reuse announcement to send to multiple groups with some customization, allow group members to communicate with each other

Added by:  Daphne UC Berkeley (from jira issue:   http://jira.media.berkeley.edu/jira/browse/LSG-15914)

Faculty Research Project Groups

Professor A needs to create cross-institutional research project sub-groups

Professor A is a co-PI on a cross-institutional research project that has just been awarded a large grant. She would like to create a shared space, in which all of the people that will participate on the research project may come and work collaboratively together. They need to be able to tag and share access to research files; share a wiki space for collaborative work; create pages of content; maintain a blog to provide research updates. Different members of the research group would have different access privileges and some of the research data is on human research candidates and so would come under more stringent access controls than many of the others files. Some of the data stores that will be accessible, and taggable through the Sakai interface would not be fully available to the faculty and researchers outside the home institution. In addition, due to grant funding requirements, she will be required to publish subsets of the research data on public accessible web pages. Therefore, Professor A needs to create numerous groups to identify and maintain appropriate access levels to the different areas of the project workspace; such as the non-home-institute full research data access; grad student access; research fellow access; IRB access for review; public access and so on. In addition, Professor A does not want to have to re-create each list of group membership between the repository, tagging and Sakai system so she would like her group memberships list to be shared between these systems (note: sharing the exact same permissions assignments between the system is not necessary).

Use Cases Included:  Create randomly assigned groups, add members to groups randomly; pull memberships from central Grants Management System

Added by:  Barbra Mack (NYU)

Shared interests, attributes, etc. Groups

Similar research interest group

Sergio would like to find other people at the university (broader than campus?) that have similar research interests around urban planning in developing countries to form a SIG (special interest group).  He's been thinking about bringing a group together to work on a project in South Africa.  Once he finds others with similar interests, he can put out a call introducing his project idea to see who else might like to participate.  Generally, Sergio would also like to create a space where all colleagues with similar research interests can share and discuss ideas. 

Use Cases Included:  Find people by interest, Announce group, Invite to group, Give group workspace

Added by:  Daphne (UCB)

Study Abroad Location group

NYU will created shared collaborative spaces for each of its global study abroad sites. These sites will be used to provide students access to information relevant to their specific global site, such as maps, visa information. Students will use it as their "community" space to self-organize shared events and find out about formally hosted events for their site, share location information such as a great restaurant; etc. Students actively enrolled in a study abroad location would be automatically enrolled in this common site. Newly admitted students could join to learn about the experiences abroad.

Use Cases Included:  Find people by interest, group workspace,

Added by:  Barbra Mack (NYU)

Turning a group of personal network contacts into a SIG that people can join

Christy Gonzalo is not blind but is visually impaired. She's made several contacts with people who have similar issues and formed a group within her social network that she uses as a mailing list. She thinks others might be dealing with similar issues as the friends she's made and wants to to make a group that people can find and join, starting with her own contacts, so she doesn't have to invite people and so she can share ownership with her friend James (so he can add and approve). They may also want to create a website.

Use Cases Included:  to come

Added by:  Keli Amann (Stanford)

Group Sign Up

Tutorial Group Signup

Bio 1 has a lecture (in large lecture theatre) with 1000 students enrolled and tutorial sessions (in smaller groups, say 10-20 students).  Ashish, the instructor, would like all students to sign up for a tutorial session in the first week of term. Ahish will create 50 sessions now but he won't allow students to sign up until next Wednesday at noon.  However, he wants them to be able to see information about the sessions now so they can begin planning. They likely have to do this with many of their courses and make sure time tables don't clash.  They are also anxious about getting their preferred tutor and that the location works with their schedule before and after.  First, Ashish, will see if the course convenor, Michael, will create all of the tutorials for him.  If he's doesn't have time right away, the instructor will do it himself.  Signup will be enabled on Wednesday at noon which Ashish also wants students know in order to provide equal opportunity to people to get the best slots.  He would love for the sign-up time to show up in the student's calendars and allow them to see if they have conflicts.  Each student will need to be signed up for 1 tutorial. Students can continue to switch their (what tutorials they get into for other course will affect and perhaps change the tutorial they want for this course) selection until the end of the 1st week of class.  At that point, any further changes will be by course admin approval only.  The course admin will make appropriate changes in the application since an ovveride of class size will be necessary in some cases.

Use Cases Included: Create groups, Allow sign up (instructor), Sign up (students), Invite to group of groups?,  Enable sign-up in future, View group attributes, Override set class size, Switch groups

Added by:  Daphne (UCB) (based on conversation with Stephen & David in Cape Town)

Event Sign-up

Students will be using a wiki for turning in their assignments in the majority of their business school classes so Robin is going to hold 3 different optional training sessions during the 1st week of classes.  Students may then sign up for 1 of the 3 sessions.

Use Cases Included: TBD

Added by:  Daphne (UCB) (based on conversation with Stephen & David in Cape Town)

Elective project sign-up

Each year, about 100 medical students sign up for elective projects (with associated online workspaces) with a supervisor. Each supervisor can only work with 4 students at most. Some supervisors and topics are 
much more in demand than others, and so competition can be fierce.

Students need to be aware of topics and supervisors beforehand so they can figure out which electives they are are interested in.  Once it opens for sign up, it will all be over in a few minutes. 

Use Cases Included:

Added by:  Daphne (UCB) (based on conversation with Stephen & David in Cape Town)

Sign up for 2 of 8 modules

Ashish would like students to sign up for 2 of the 8 modules offered this semester in Bio 1.  He'll post the details of each and open it up for students.  They can sign up and drop modules up to the day it is scheduled.  But they can only sign up for 2 modules.

Use Cases Included:

Added by:  Daphne (UCB) (based on conversation with Stephen & David in Cape Town)

Portfolio Groups

Soon to come...

Manage membership (add & drop, default abilities, status, attributes, etc.)

Move students between project groups

Note:  This is a continuation of "Instructor coordinates problem-based learning teams" above

Robin finds out from a couple of her daytime MBA students that they work part-time most days and have more availability in the evenings and on weekends for their project-based team work.   She looks at the teams she set up yesterday and moves both students to a new group with evening MBA's.   She also makes a note on their profile so she'll know next time.  As luck would have it, 2 new daytime MBA students joined the class after talking to her yesterday.  Robin assigns each of them to one of the "short" teams.  She does another check just to double check that each student is assigned to a team.  Then she sends a note to teams affected by the change letting them know what happened.

Use Cases Included:  Move member from one group to another, Add members to group, announce to group

Added by:  Daphne Ogle (UCB)

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