January 20, 2025, by Ben Atkinson

Group Choice Activity in Moodle

In late 2024, we introduced a new activity type to Moodle called Group Choice. This activity has many versatile applications within teaching and learning, but essentially at its core provides the ability for students to enrol themselves into a group or groups which have previously been set up on the module. Before introducing this activity, the only way to add students to groups was either by manually assignment one-by-one or by uploading a spreadsheet of group membership. To complicate matters the later approach could be achieved by sending the spreadsheet in the correct format, to a colleague in Learning Technologies.

Using the new Group Choice activity allows you to create groups which are empty and then add these to the activity and set the parameters so that students can add themselves to one or many of the selected groups. You could use this approach to offer students a choice of assessment topics for their final summative essay, for example. If you set up a group titled for each topic, added a parameter to allow only one choice, students could select the topic most relevant to them and only once they have completed this step would they be presented with the submission box. The groups created can later be used to filter submission during marking, which is especially useful for large cohort modules. However, be aware that if you wish to use groups for filtered marking there is now a prerequisite that you ensure these groups are ‘visible’ and not ‘hidden’ during the initial set up. You cannot change this setting after the fact, so be sure to plan ahead and think how you intent to use the groups which you’re setting up.

As you can see, trough the combined use of group choice and release conditions, you achieve some quite powerful automated processes within your Moodle site which dramatically improve the student experience while at the same time reducing the admin overhead for the teaching team. Another interesting approach could be to create groups for certain sub-topics within the module. So students can opt-in to a certain pathway or to study additional content on a specific topic as required. Again, using the release conditions which ensure that certain topics within a Moodle module are only visible to certain groups, you can create whole sections of content on specific themes that are only visible to students who opt-in to the relevant topic via the Group Choice activity. The same could be said of certain fieldwork tasks.

In this short post, we have outlined some of the applications of the new Group Choice activity and how you might use it within your Moodle site. There is more information on how the activity works and detailed overview of the various settings, on the workspace page.

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