[ARCHIVED] Project group with a single student

[maguire]

I have a course where students can do projects by themselves or with one or two other people. I would like to be able to prevent a second student from joining the self-sign up group when a student wishes to work by themselves. Currently, I manually rename the group to add " - a single person group". It does not seem possible to set this group's size to 1 via the GUI - it limits the range of choices to the range [2 ..maximum size for the group set].

Is it possible to set the number of students in a specific group to 1?

[kblack]

Hi  @maguire  - Yes, but let Canvas do it automatically.  I just now tried this on a sample class to make sure this still worked, and it does.  Here's what to do.

-Know the number of students you have.  🙂

-Create a New Group set named what you like.

-At the dialog box, set it to what you see below.  Note that you are NOT enabling the "I'll create groups manually" radio button but rather letting Canvas do it automatically. Also, you are NOT allowing self-sign up. The area circled, below, should be equal to your number of students:

-Click Save and presto! Instant one-person groups.

That should do it.  I do not think there is a group limit within that set, so I admit I haven't tried this on a class with 100 students, but this trick should work for you.

Hope this helps, Gerald!

[maguire]

The problem is that I want the self signup property - as the students organize their own project groups.

[kblack]

Ah...yes....I totally forgot/missed the "with one or two other people" bit.  Apologies.  There is really not a graceful way around this, I'm afraid, other than disabling the ability to allow self self-up once ALL student groups are set. And that indeed is a property of the group set rather than an individual group within the set, I'm afraid. 

I suppose if you knew ahead of time which students would likely want to have single-person groups, you could create a separate group set just for the "solo" groups and then duplicate the assignment, and then assign it only to that specific group set, as covered here: How do I assign an assignment to a course group? and then do likewise for the multi-person groups, assigning the other one to the multi-person groups.

Or, know which are the multiple-person groups and clone the group set and then remove the single-person groups from the cloned copy.  Depending on your numbers, though, that's still a lot of work, I'm afraid.

[xtinaone]

I know this thread is pretty old but did you figure out a way to accomplish this task?  I'm in the same position and need just 1 person self assigned to a group. They are picking a date from a list.  I don't want to use a discussion since that could get messy and needs to be managed by someone (instructor is not keen on this idea).  And all of the other options for external software needs to be purchased by my department.  Which in the long run will probably be okay, but we don't have the time to wait for a order to be processed (College red tape) before the course begins.