The new(ish) option to require students to be in the same section when assigning group members is great! However, there is one more feature that would make this incredibly useful (especially in large courses): selecting which sections to  use during this process.

 

At our institution, we often have large courses which contain both the lecture and lab or recitation sections. It is ideal for an instructor to maintain one course, but often groups and other activities need to be restricted to specific lab sections. As all students share a lecture section, the current feature will not allow for the generation of lab specific groups.

 

Allowing instructors to say "out of these groups, make sure they share sections" or (possibly a little more clean), "ignore these section enrollments" would be extremely helpful. Group setup is not always a one time thing, and an instructor may even want to create a group set exclusively out of one lab section, for instance to randomly assign lab partners.

 

The size of these courses really makes manually assigning these groups a burden for instructors, and that also removes the ability to assign them randomly.

 

Ideally, instructors would be able to choose as many or as few of the sections as they want to build the group set with, and then also specify whether students must share a section to be in the same group within that set.