Creating Group Discussions

Group discussions allow you to create a discussion topic that will only be visible to a specific group of students.  You must associate the discussion with a Group Category.  Members of the group will see each other’s posts, but will not see the posts of students in other groups.  This is helpful if you have a large enrollment, and you want the students to interact with each other in smaller groups.  For example, your class of 100, may have 5 discussion groups in which only 20 of the students will collaborate and interact directly with each other for a given discussion topic.  

There are 2 ways to create group discussions — via the Discussions tool or in the Group tool.

The Group tool:

1. 1. Click on the down arrow to the right of the category title and select Edit Category.
      
   2. Click the box to the left of Set up discussion areas.
   3. Choose an existing Forum or create a New Forum.
   4. Create a new topic or select an existing topic that has no posts or restrictions.
   5. Click Save.

1. 6. If you selected the Create new topic option above, the Create Restricted Topics screen will appear. On this screen, you select the number of discussion topics to be created.  There are two (2) options:
      • Create one topic per group: Creates a separate discussion topic for each group.
      • Create one topic with threads separated by group: Creates a single discussion topic that houses all the groups (students will only see posts from their specific group members).

7. Create a Title for the discussion topic.
8. If you want to create another group discu
9. Click Create and Next at the bottom of the page.

The Discussion area

1. Go to the Discussions area.
2. Create a new topic.
3. Select Group or section topic as the Topic Type.
4. Click the Group or Section Category drop down arrow to select the desired group category.
   
5. Enter a Title for the discussion topic.
6. Complete setting up the discussion.