One of the feature requested most often from instructors most often is an option to arrange students into feedback groups and save those groups for later use so that the groups don’t need to be created over and over again. This is especially important for instructors who have regular groups or teams that carry over between reviews.
We’ll build that option as an official feature in a future version of the app, but there’s a hack that that makes reusable groups possible right now, courtesy of the task repository.
To set up your reusable groups, follow these steps:
- Start a new review and name it “Saved Groups” or something similar that you’ll remember.
- Arrange your students into groups however you’d like them.
- Save the review as a draft.
This draft review can now serve as a template. The next time you want to create a review with these same groups, start a new review and then look for the “Load from Library” button.
If your “Saved Groups” review doesn’t show up automatically, you can search for it by name and even “star” it so that it’s easy to find in the future. Once you’ve found it, click the “Load” button. You’ll see the “Create a Task” form, completely empty except for your saved groups. Customize the rest of the review (title, due date, response types, etc) and you’ll be good to go.
Bonus Hack: You can use this same trick if you need to reuse other components of a review, like instructions or response types. Use the repository to find any of your previously-saved tasks and, when you load one of them, you’ll have all of the components of the saved review at your disposal. You can discard all but the ones you need or keep them all.
