There are many times when students work in groups on an assignment. Blackboard allows you to set up group work, including group submissions. This article will take a quick look at the process, signposting to existing articles where relevant.

Step One – Create Groups

The first part of the process is to create the groups themselves. In your module, go to the Control Panel. Click once on Users and Groups, and then once on Groups. Hovering your mouse over the Create button lets you start to set up your groups.

A Single Group lets you set up groups on an individual level, whereas a Group Set lets you set up a batch of groups using the same parameters.

Self Enrol lets students sign themselves up to a group, and Manual Enrol lets you enrol the students directly. If you are using the Group Set option, you get the additional option to let Blackboard randomly enrol students into the groups.

Step Two – Create the Assignment

Now that you have your groups set up, you can now set up an assignment, and enable the Group option under Submission Details. You can then assign which groups are taking part in this assignment. This guide explores the process in more detail: https://eatsupport.tees.ac.uk/staff/knowledgebase/creating-an-assignment/

When a member of the group submits, that constitutes a submission for all the group members. Therefore, if the submission is set up to only allow a single attempt, once one student has submitted, no other members of that group will be able to submit. Students get a notification message reminding them of this.

Step Three – Grade the Assignment

Once students have submitted, you can now grade the assignment.

If you use the Needs Grading option, you can give a score and feedback that will apply to every group member. You will see there is also the option to assign individual feedback to different group members.

If you use the Full Grade Centre and then View Grade, clicking the Grade Group Attempt button will let you assign feedback to all group members. From here, over in the bottom right of the screen, you can see a space to assign individual feedback if required.

Once graded, group members can then see feedback that applies to themselves.

Managing Group Assignments

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