Grouping Scenario - Group Assignments
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
A course involves a collaborative activity, where learners are expected to work as a group to produce either individual outputs where they are assessed individually, or a single group output where they are assessed as a team (or both).
User Stories
Needs
As a course author, I need to be able to configure an assignment so that a single submission from a group will apply a grade to all learners within a group.
Wants
As a course author, I want to be able to define if group assignment work is graded by self-assessment (individually or as a group), peers, or a member of staff, in order to lower the workload.
As a learner in a group project, I want to approve a group submission on my behalf before it is finally submitted, in order to avoid undesirable submissions, or my fellow group members going rogue.
Platform Implementations
Open edX
Open edX has no supported group project functionality, though there is a version in the edx-solutions fork:
Regardless, in its current state, there is no explicit support for a group assignment. Teams facilitate discussion of a group assignment, but the model of a single learner submitting for their team is not available.
This feature is something that is currently in development, but has not yet been productised and made readily available to the wider Open edX community at the time of writing.
Moodle
Moodle’s regular assignment tool has the option of being used for group assignments. There are a number of interesting options related to this besides simply setting that the assignment is a group assignment. Only one member of the group needs to submit the assignment, but the default configuration is to require all learners to actually click the ‘submit’ button before the assignment is fully submitted, effectively adding an approval process. Staff can configure whether the grades and feedback provided apply to all learners, or to individual learners.
As this process is fairly in-depth, rather than recounting every step, here are links to documentation where the process is described:
EdtechGuides: Create Moodle Assignment guide: Create Group Assignment
https://www.umass.edu/it/support/moodle/configure-grade-group-assignments-moodle
Canvas
Canvas’ group functionality appears to be built entirely around group assignments, and features a range of tools like:
Group collaborations - Automatically shared files in tools such as Google Docs or Microsoft 365
Assignments can be set to group assignments with a checkbox. By default, learners receive a grade for group assignments as a group, all receiving the same grade, but a secondary checkbox allows learners within the group to gain individual grades from the same submission.
A group assignment is always submitted by a single learner in the group, as individual submissions do not technically require a distinct group assignment to be configured - they’re just regular assignments.