Blackboard Tip of the Week – Hudson Valley Community College Campus Chronicle

A number of faculty like to create a Discussion Forum in the Discussion Board area of their course, which they name something along the lines of Social Café or Ask a Question, and which they intend for their students to use as a place where they can engage in virtual conversations, ask questions of one another, share course-related information, etc.

Did you know, though, that by using the Groups tool in the current version of Blackboard, you can allow your students to form their own study groups, in which they can share files or e-mail within their Group, create and use a group-specific Discussion Board, interact within a virtual classroom or take advantage of available communications tools such as blogs or journals?

To provide your students with a potentially motivating and powerful learning resource of this kind, simply create a tool link on your course menu that points to the Groups area of your course (How do I do that?), and to which you give an appropriate name, such as Student Study Lounge. By default, students who access the Groups area in your course can freely create their own groups, in which other students can then enroll themselves.

To create a group, a student does the following:

Navigating to the Groups area of your course, s(he) selects the dark grey Create Group button.
In the Create Self-Enrollment Group window that displays, the student gives the Group a name, provides a title for the Group sign-up sheet, indicates — if wanted — the maximum number of users who can enroll in the Group, and then selects Submit to create the Group.

When students enroll in a Group and enter that Group area, they will automatically have access to the following Group tools, which they can use however they wish as part of their work for your course:

Collaboration (including a Virtual Classroom)
File Exchange
Group Blog
Group Discussion Board
Group Journal
Group Tasks
Send E-mail

Also, once students self-enroll in one or more groups, they will see — in addition to the course menu link to the Groups area that you provided — an expandable/collapsible My Groups button, which will appear directly below the course menu and will allow them to access the Group(s) in which they are enrolled without having to first enter the Groups area of your course.

Important Note: If you use Groups in your courses, in which you create and name the Groups, assign specific users to them and/or specify what Group tools those users will have available to them, you do not want to leave the Groups area of your course with the default settings in place. In these instances, you would instead want to follow the steps for creating Groups and Group Sets that are described in the tutorials that the following links point to:

For additional options that you can choose from when using the Groups tool in Blackboard, or for any questions that you may have about this robust tool, please do not hesitate to contact the Distance and Online Learning Office (629-7070/DLHelp@hvcc.edu).

Published: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 12:45:28 +0000 by m.petersen