Group tool: Brightspace

Each group in Brightspace at the moment has a maximum capacity of 200 participants and is restricted to 200 groups per category.

The Brightspace Group Tool enables you to divide the entire class into groups or to group only some of the students. You can group students for administrative purposes or to have them work on assignments together. You can group students manually, automatically divide students into groups or let them self-enroll in groups.

Tip: If you want to have self-enrollment groups with different sizes or if you want to have a waitlist, you can use the Group Self Enrollment Tool.

Creating groups

Enrollment types

Sharing files in a group

Group Communication

Deleting Groups

Deleting groups has severe implications. When you delete groups, be warned that this will also delete any group assignment submission folders and group discussion topics. The implications are that if a group of students has already uploaded work in a submission folder, that uploaded work will also be deleted. Similarly, any discussion forums that you have set up for groups will be removed. So think carefully before you delete your groups. Recovering data from such a deletion step is unfortunately not possible.
When the course is complete and all the grades are submitted, then you might want to consider deleting the groups that were not used. Even then, please take note that you may need to keep some student work as evidence for accreditation or audits in the future. So do not remove these groups unless you’re absolutely certain you have a copy of the work.