Set up group projects

Outcome You set up a separate group-work space with one instance per group, and group members are invited as Instance Editors.

Before you start

• You hold the Organisation Faculty or Organisation Manager role (required to create a new space). If you are a TA without those rights, ask the course instructor to create the space for you.

• You have a list of group memberships (which students belong to which group).

• You have decided whether to use shared editing (most reliable in JupyterLab 4.0.0 or later - see Collaborative editing in JupyterLab below).

Group projects work best as a separate space from regular coursework. Distributing two threads of workflows on top of each other tangles individual and group work - keeping them apart prevents that. The space hierarchy for group projects looks like this:

• A group-work space containing one instance per group.

• A regular coursework space with one instance per student.

• Students see both spaces in their Dashboard.

Create the group-work Space

Follow the procedure in Create a new course, but give it a name that clearly distinguishes it from the regular coursework space (for example: Statistics 101 — Group Work).

Create one Instance per group

For each group, create an instance and invite its members as editors.

1

Navigate to the group-work space.

2

Click the cogwheel icon and select Project Users / Instances.

3

Click + ADD NEW INSTANCE.

4

Choose whether to start from a snapshot or create an empty instance.

5

Name the instance after the group.

Invite group members as Instance Editors

1

In Project Users / Instances, open the Instances tab.

2

Find the group Instance you just created and click + INVITE USERS.

3

Select Option 1 - User Invitation and Invite to an existing shared instance.

4

Choose Instance Editor as the role.

5

Enter the email addresses of the group members and click + INVITE.

When entering email addresses for users already on Nuvolos, use the email listed under their name in the Members list. If the invitation is sent to a different email, the student will not be able to accept it with their existing Nuvolos account.

Upload files and distribute

Once the space and instances are in place, upload group-work files to the Master Instance of the group-work space and distribute as usual. Since group and individual workspaces are separate, new groups added later can also be initialised from the Distributed Instance.

As the course proceeds, you can use cumulative distribution to push new material to all group instances, and you can bridge information between regular and group-work spaces via cross-distributing between spaces.