Students sometimes need to be divided into groups by the teacher, or you may want to allow students to choose their own group or, for example, their seminar topic. Grouping can already be done in Sisu at the time of course registration, but if you want an agile way to do it in the middle of a course, there are some edutech-tools available.
Partitioner (Jakaja)
At the Faculty of Educational Sciences, the Partitioner web service has been developed to automatically divide students into small groups, taking into account students’ preferences for the grouping criteria. The order of registration does not need to be considered, so Partitioner provides a fairer way to allocate students into groups. Read more about Partitioner’s development and support in the Flamma news item. You can access Partitioner by logging in with your UH credentials.
Go to Partitioner.
Moodle Group choice and Choice -activities
Within the Moodle learning environment, you can use the Group choice- or the Choice activity to let students choose their own groups on a first come, first served basis (unlike Partitioner).
With Group choice, students join Moodle groups directly. The teacher selects the available groups and can set maximum sizes. Students can see group members (if allowed) and, if necessary, switch groups. Group choice is used when the goal is to form course working groups based on students’ own selections, because assigning students to Moodle groups is a prerequisite for using group features. Instructions for Group choice are available in English in the Moodle documentation.
Choice is a general polling and voting tool where students select from options rather than from groups. You can set response limits, allow changes to selections, and define how results are shown to students. The Choice activity can be used when groups do not need to be technically created in Moodle—for example, when the purpose is simply to choose a course theme. In the Choice activity, it is also possible to limit group size, and students can be allowed to cancel their selection and move to another group if there is space. Instructions for the Choice activity in English are available in the Moodle documentation.
M365 Office document in OneDrive or Teams
The simplest way to give students the most flexibility to choose their own groups and swap choices with peers is a shared spreadsheet that students can fill in online themselves. The easiest approach is to create, for example, an Excel spreadsheet in which the teacher lists the available groups and their capacities, then share the editing link with students via Moodle, for instance. Students then add their names to the desired group (if there is space). If students use a Teams space, or one is created for them, they can also have chat discussions among themselves—for example, about switching from an already selected group—if this is a frequent need in large student cohorts.