Group Assignments for Faculty/Staff/TAs

Canvas has built-in functionality that allows instructors to create and assign group projects to students. 

It’s important to make sure your Group Project assignment is set up correctly before students begin submitting. Once students have submitted, your options for changing or mitigating things become limited. Your LSP or the Central Courseware team will be happy to work with you to make sure your assignment achieves your goals.

On This Page

Setting Up Your Group Assignment

There are two steps to setting up a Group Assignment in Canvas. Both of these steps must be set up for the Group Assignment to work correctly. 

Step One- Add Your Group Set in the “People” Tab

Create your group set in the “Groups” tab before the assignment opens and students begin submitting. 

Groups must be set up in the “People” tab before students submit an assignment. Otherwise, inconsistent behaviors will occur.

If you’re not sure which students will be in which group (for example, the add/drop period isn’t over yet), you can create the groups sets without putting students into them. You can later manually or randomly place students into groups, or have students sign up for groups of their choice. It’s also possible to adjust things like the max number of group members later by editing the “Split [number] of students per group” option from the drop down menu”.

Step Two – Create the Group Assignment

Follow the directions for creating a group assignment in Canvas, making sure the box for “group assignment” is checked. 

By default, Group Assignments will assign the same grade to all members of the group. If you want to assign grades individually to each student in the group, make sure to select the checkbox.

Troubleshooting & Best Practices

It’s important to set up your groups before students begin submitting to the assignment. If your groups weren’t set up before students began submitting to your Group Assignment, your assignment may not behave as expected. 

Best Practices 

Use a New Group Set for Changing Group Memberships

If you need to adjust your Groups for any reason (for example, a student drops the course), you can do one of two things:

–  Edit the assignment to grade each student individually, then use the modified Group set.
OR 
– Clone the Group set, rename the Group, and have students make any changes to self-signup group membership in the new group set. (Recommended)

*Please note that the assignment needs to have self sign up enabled and the People tab must be active in the Course navigation for students to be able to join a new group. 

Recreate your Group Sets each semester

If you’re copying a course from a previous semester (for example, using the “course import tool”), it’s important to know that the option for “projects groups” won’t automatically have any Groups associated with it in the new course. Additionally, it can be difficult to know which assignments are associated with a Group Project in a copied course. 

Troubleshooting

If your groups weren’t set up before students began submitting to your Group Assignment, your assignment may not behave as expected. Below are some quick fixes to common issues you may see.

Students will see whatever happens in their group only AFTER they are placed in a group. Keep this in mind if you are troubleshooting a Group Projects assignment. Make sure all students are in a Group before grading. 

In a graded discussion board, individual students’ posts won’t appear.

Solution: 

  1. Edit the assignment
  2. Make the Discussion board ungraded
  3. Uncheck the box for groups
  4. Save your changes
  5. Edit the assignment to make it a graded discussion again
  6. Click “save”. 

Keep in mind that if a group is assigned to a discussion board, only the group members can read and comment on the same board. Each group will have its own board. This is a different concept than a group assignment where one student submits on behalf of the entire group.

In SpeedGrader, an instructor will submit a comment and nothing will happen. 

Solution: Edit the assignment, checking the box for “Assign Grades to Each Student Individually”, and click “Save”. 

Get Help

For additional help or information, please contact your Local Support Provider or submit a request to canvas@pobox.upenn.edu.

Last Updated: 18 Dec 2023