Group Questions in Top Hat allow educators to facilitate in-class collaboration by enabling students to work together and submit one collective response per team. This feature is ideal for encouraging teamwork and peer learning in both live and assigned settings.
This guide walks you through setting up groups, enabling group submissions, and delivering these questions to your students.
Table of Contents
- Group Questions Overview
- Assigning Students to Groups
- Enabling Group Submission
- Presenting and Assigning Group Questions
- Answering a Group Question
- Changing Groups
Group Questions Overview
Beta Feature: Group Questions is currently in Beta. We are actively refining this experience and welcome your feedback!
To use Group Questions, you must first create groups in the Student Manager and then enable group submissions on specific questions. When active, teams submit one response; the resulting participation and correctness points are automatically applied to every group member's gradebook.
Assigning Students to Groups
You must assign students to groups before presenting a question, or the system will return an error. To begin, click Students in the top-left course menu.
Image: Accessing the Student Manager
To create a group:
- Check the boxes next to the names of the students you wish to group together.
- Click Change Group in the top-right corner.
- Select +Add Group to create "Group 1."
- Click Group 1 to finalize the assignment.
Image: Assigning students to a specific group
Repeat this process until all students are assigned. Group designations are saved permanently until you manually shuffle them again.
Enabling Group Submission
In the question creator, check the box labeled Group Question before saving. For a full breakdown of question types, see Educator: Top Hat Questions.
Image: Enabling the Group Question setting
Compatibility Note: Group functionality is currently unavailable for Long Answer questions or third-party app integrations.
Presenting and Assigning Group Questions
Group Questions can be delivered live or assigned for self-paced work:
- Live Presentation: Click Present in the top-right corner. You can embed these questions between slides to integrate collaboration directly into your lecture.
- Student Counter: During presentation, the student count numerator tracks individual students, not the number of groups. For example, if one group of 5 students submits a response, the count will increase by 5.
- Assignments: You can assign Group Questions in Homework or Review modes.
Limitation: Custom Assign is not available for Group Questions. All students in the course or section must be assigned the question simultaneously.
Answering a Group Question
Students answer group questions using their own devices. Any group member can modify the team's response; however, the final submission recorded when the question is closed (or when a student locks it in) becomes the official group response.
Changing Groups
Shuffling groups after a question has been administered will not retroactively change the grades earned. Grades are tied to the group configuration active at the time the response was submitted.