Using group assignments in Canvas

Group assignments can be a great way to foster student collaboration and develop a sense of community in online learning.

When creating group assignments in Canvas, the basic steps are:

  • Create a Group Set your subject. This will allow you to determine the groups before you go ahead with creating the assignment itself. You can manually assign students to each group yourself using the Bulk group membership tool or allow students to create their own groups.
  • Create the group assignment. When creating an assignment you will have the option to tick 'This is a group assignment'. When you tick this box, you can then choose the Group set as per the previous step.
  • Decide whether students will be graded as a group, or individually.  After checking the box 'This is a group assignment' you will also see a setting 'Assign Grades to Each Student Individually'. If you check this box, you will be able to allocate a different mark to each member of a group. If you leave the box unchecked, when you mark and give feedback for one of the students in the group, or annotate the paper, the mark and all feedback will automatically populate for the other students in the group.

Please note!

Ensure that you do not change the membership of groups *after* you have created the assignment. This will cause the assignment to revert to an *individual* assignment and cannot be reversed!

For more information on Groups, see our full index of guides.

For help and support, contact Learning Environments.