Group Manager will help you keep track of your students' work and protect your Catalyst tools from unauthorized use. Use it to provide or restrict access to your Catalyst Tools. For example, Group Manager can let only the members of your class access a GoPost discussion board, help distribute Portfolio projects to a list of students, and can let assistants help create and maintain your Web site with SimpleSite. You can also use Group Manager with Protect Network IDs in order to provide non-UW people with secure access to your tools.

You can create a group by manually entering in a list of UW NetIDs, Protect Network IDs, selecting the title of a course you are currently teaching from a list, or using some combination of the above.

Group Manager is connected to Student Information Systems, so your Catalyst groups based on class lists will be updated nightly with the latest information from the registrar. As students add or drop your courses they will be automatically be added to or removed from the Catalyst groups attached to each course's class list.

Groups created with Group Manager can be used with any of the Catalyst Tools, so you don't have to recreate a group for each specific tool. If you use both GoPost and WebQ in a class or research project, you can create one group that will provide access to both tools.

Group Manager will maintain groups based on class lists as long as the courses are in the registrar's database. When the course membership is no longer available to Catalyst, the students that were associated with the group will disappear if the group is edited. Group Manager will display the list of courses you are teaching as long as the information is maintained by the registrar, so you may see several quarters' courses in the list of courses you are teaching.

About Subgroups

Once you have created a group, Group Manager also enables you to put the members of your group into small groups, known as subgroups. A few of the Catalyst Tools use subgroups to help students collaborate online. For example, with Peer Review you can divide your class into subgroups to review and comment on each other's papers in an online forum. For more information, see the how-to information about creating subgroups.

About Assistants

You can also use a Catalyst group to provide teaching and research assistants access to certain Catalyst tools. In Portfolio, you can use a group of assistants to allow your TAs to review and comment on student portfolios. You can create a group of assistants with SimpleSite to enable them to help maintain your Web site. There is no minimum group size; if you want to only add one assistant, you may create a group consisting of just one person.