Why Use Blackboard: Groups

You can think of Blackboard as a kind of course management "Swiss Army Knife." It provides faculty members with a highly useful suite of tools, all in the same package. When you create groups in Blackboard, you can provide all members of the groups with their own Swiss Army Knife within the larger course structure. In other words, when you create groups of students, you can provide each group with the following tools: Group File Exchange, Group Discussion Board, Group Virtual Classroom, and Group Email. Those tools are very useful for peer editing groups, for collaborative group work, or for collaborative assignments.

If you assign a collaborative project, for example, you can create the groups of collaborating students in Blackboard. You can then assign the appropriate tools to each group so that students can communicate with one another synchronously and asynchronously, share drafts of their work, send email to one another, etc. In other words, students can hold online group meetings using the Virtual Classroom feature, keep one another up-to-date on their progress via the Group Discussion Board, and upload drafts of work into the Group File Exchange area. Only group members can access those areas of your course; they have, in effect, their own course within the course. You can also communicate directly with the group by sending email to group members via the Blackboard Email Feature, choosing the "Select Groups" option and selecting the appropriate group(s) as recipients.

For instructions on how to create groups in Blackboard, see Creating Groups in Your Course.

We also have a Wiki tool from Learning Objects that allows groups of students to create collaborative Web sites using Blackboard. The tool allows for version tracking, along with the typical multiple author rights that you would expect from a Wiki.

Please note that with Version 8, Blackboard introduced a Peer and Self-Assessment feature that allows you to guide your students in the feedback they provide to one another. However, at this point, you can only choose how many essays each student has to review, and then Blackboard randomly chooses which essays each student needs to respond to. You can't select peer-review groups using "Peer and Self-Assessment," so we currently don't recommend that feature.

Written by Leslie Harris, originally for the Office of Instructional Technology at the University of Scranton. Revised with permission and adapted to the Bucknell University Blackboard environment. Last revised August 13, 2008.  Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.