Grouping in the Authoring Environment

This animation shows how to use Grouping Activities in a LAMS sequence.

Grouping activities are placed by selecting the Grouping icon from the grouping from the Sequence Management at the top of the environment, then placing the Grouping Object on the Authoring space. Unlike other activities, double-clicking the Grouping activity on the authoring space will not open a new Properties Window, but will instead open the Properties Inspector, which is where all settings for a grouping object are changed.

The name of the grouping can be specified by "Title" - this is the text that will be shown in the "Grouping" drop-down menu in all other tools. It is possible to have more than one Grouping per sequence, and to have different activity tools use different Groupings. It is useful to give your groupings descriptive titles in this circumstance, as this makes choosing the correct style of grouping from the Properties for an activity easier.

Grouping can be set in a variety of ways to suit the classroom environment.

In Random mode, the author can either choose to set the number of total groups needed, or the number of learners to be within each group.
In either of these circumstances, the learners will be randomly allocated to their groups within the sequence, and they will stay within these groups for any of the activities that are assigned to that particular Grouping activity.

Grouping can also be set to Chosen mode by selecting "Chosen" from the drop down menu of "Grouping type". In Chosen mode, Learners must be assigned to groups through the Monitoring environment. The Learners can then be allocated to groups in the Monitor window by clicking on the "Go" button next to "Choose grouping" under the heading "Required Tasks" on the Lesson tab.