What is a Group?
A Group is a collection of learners that can be enrolled as a subset of your total learners, can be enrolled into one or many courses, and are assigned a Group trainer to oversee and receive notifications about their progress.
An example of a Group could be different cohorts. This could be an Onboarding cohort of new members to your organization. Let's say, all 15 new members will need to complete the same 7 courses so you can place them in a Q1 Onboarding Group and assign a Group trainer who will be responsible for that Group. This might be the Hiring Manager so they are involved in the new member's progress updates.
In addition, Groups are often used for different departments internally or even different physical locations or branches. EX: Sales, Support, Management, All Departments, etc. or Houston, Austin, Denver, LA, NYC.
The benefit of Groups is really saving you time from enrolling everyone into every course, organizing learners together in one bucket, and allowing for reporting capabilities you wouldn't see if they were all just learners in a bunch of courses.
The most important things to remember about Groups are:
Groups live in the Users section
Learners are enrolled in a Group
Many courses or one course can live in a Group
Groups are separate from Resource folders
Groups have an owner/creator called a Group trainer
Groups have specific settings that apply to that Group
Groups can have settings specific to a course, which can be different for every Group enrolled in a course
Groups allow you to use the courses but with different settings
Where can I find and create Groups?
Groups can be created in two places, the Users tab and the Learners tab inside of a course. If you have the correct trainer permissions, you can access the 'Groups' tab on the Users tab > Groups. The most common place for a member to create a Group is on this page. From here, you can create a Group, add learners, courses, and Group trainers to it.
You can also access Groups from any course dashboard, click on Learners and your learners will be broken out into Groups and Ungrouped learners.
You can also add learners to an existing Group from the Share tab inside a course (see below).
Why should I enroll a learner or learners into Groups?
A Group is useful because it allows you to set specific settings for a Group of learners and trainers with the course(s) enrolled in it. For example, you can change the course start and end dates and completion settings specific to a Group inside of a course. It also allows you to re-use the same course over and over again for different Groups of learners over time. Lastly, you can also view Group reports which allow you to compare Groups who have gone through similar courses and review a subset of your learner's progress vs. needing to scroll through all results to find their data.
Creating a Group
1. Begin by heading to the Users tab > Groups > Create Group
2. You'll need to give the Group a name and this is important to have a good name so it's clear what this Group contains.
3. You can then add learners, courses, and a Group trainer into this Group!
Pro tip - You can also skip adding the learners yourself and ONLY add the courses and Group trainer. This allows you to use a Group Enrollment Link and whoever has the link will self-enroll into this Group. A great option if you don't know who exactly needs to be in a Group, you'd like to list the link externally somewhere, or the list is quite long.
To use the Group Enrollment Link, you'll click on the plus sign next to "Learners" > and click on "copy" next to "enroll with a link" (see below).
Groups have a Group Trainer
If you create a Group you can be assigned as the Group trainer. This means all notifications for this Group will go to this trainer and not the trainers listed on the Trainers tab. Workspace trainers are all trainers listed on your Users > Trainers tab.
You can either add an existing trainer as a Group trainer or create a new Group trainer.
If you only want this trainer to be able to see the data and learners in their Group, then you'll want to create a new Group trainer by clicking on the plus sign next to trainers and clicking "create group trainer".
To add an existing trainer to a Group, click on the plus sign next to the trainers and click "add existing trainer". After you choose your trainer from the list, it will ask if you want to allow them to teach or teach and enroll. See below for the difference between the two.
NOTE: Creating a new trainer will automatically give them the teach permission
To update a Group Trainers role, you can click into the Group > click on "Trainers" > and click on "edit" next to the name of the trainer who's role you want to update.
Still not sure what role you should give your trainer, check out this article "What role should I give my trainer?"
Workspace trainers with the facilitator role can enroll and remove learners and trainers into your Group.
And if you are wondering, "can I move a learner from one Group to another?", check out this article.
If you have any more questions about Groups, reach out to us in the Live Chat!