7 Groupsession

A groupsession is a collection of sessions for a group of students. It is intended as a tool to organize the work of students in a classroom. Therefore, a group will generally be a class of students (tough it can be any group of students, regardless their relation, hence the name 'group').

Each student will get only 1 session within a groupsession. Each student can get its own individual session, if necessary.

(v4.2:) A groupsession can be used on a single, standalone computer.

Using multiple computers makes groupsessions really useful. The server manages groupsessions, clients can join and leave active groupsessions. This way the same groupsession can be accessed anywhere. The server administrates the work of all students and calls them automatically, the teacher is allowed to view results online.

7.1 Management

The management of groupsessions involves creating, maintaining and finishing groupsessions. Due to its nature the management of a groupsession is the responsibility of the teacher. Therefore, users need to have teacher privileges will be allowed to perform management tasks.

Important: Only users with teacher or administrator privileges or higher will be allowed to enter the management section of groupsessions.

Students are the consumers of a groupsession, they will be allowed to join and leave a groupsession (see below), but nothing more than that. If a student picks  the wrong name by mistake, he or she will need the teacher to fix this.

7.2 Creating a groupsession

The process of creating a groupsession is easy and straightforward. At first it may look difficult, but with some experience you will find that a groupsession can be created and started within a minute.

Click Groupsession - New to start creating a new groupsession.
(You also use the groupsession manager. Click View - Groupsessions. You will now get a list of active groupsessions. Click the button Add.)

A wizard will appear to create a new groupsession. This wizard will collect three pieces of information: some metadata, sessions and a list of students. This is reflected in the three pages on the groupsession-wizard.

7.2.1 General data

Some practical information will be collected on this page.

The singleline title is important, as students will see this title when joining the groupsession. Students will be offered a list of titles, so depending on the needs in your organization you might want to agree on a specific format, including information like week numbers or dates, classnumbers or -names, teacher names or codes and the like. You might also want to agree on a specific order of this information, to get an uniform display of all groupsessions.

It's also possible to specify some comments.

Two calling options are available:

• Select name from list. Students will see the names of all pending students and need to select theirs in order to begin.
  
• Call automatically. The computer will select 1 or 2 students and will display only their names, indicating they are next.
  

Ultimately, it is possible to limit access to this groupsession to the current accountfamily, or simply give everyone access to this particular groupsession.
Limiting access becomes more useful when there are many clients, it will be more secure and less confusing as connecting clients will only see groupsessions relevant to them.

7.2.2 Tasks

Each students will be linked to a task. You will need to add at least one task. The first task added will automatically become the default task. The default task will be attached to to each student when they are added to the groupsession (see below). You can change the default task later on.

Tasks can be added with the form used for normal sessions.

7.2.3 List of students

The final step is adding students to the groupsession.

When creating a new list of students you can save this list to a file, for later retrieval.

When you add new students, the default task will be assigned to each of them automatically. If you use more than 1 session you'll need to assign non-default tasks manually.

All students are now in the status Pending. If, for some reason, a student needs to be excluded you need to assign another status manually, like Absent or Not participating.

The table below lists all possible statuses of a student:

Status	Description
Pending	The student is waiting for his turn
Busy	The student is busy with a session
Busy (Error)	The student is busy with a session, but an error occurred. This usually happens if the connection got lost during the session. Manual correction is necessary to correct this status
Needs retry	As pending, but the student already has completed a session
Completed	The student has completed a session
Absent	The student has not completed a session and is not pending (technically equal to Not participating)
Not participating	The student has not completed a session and is not pending (technically equal to Absent)

7.3 Maintaining a groupsession

Once a new groupsession is created it will become active automatically. During its lifetime you can follow the progress, view reports of students who have completed their sessions or change the status of a student.

Join and leave
In order to participate students need to join the groupsession. Then just click the Start session button. Depending on your settings students need to select their name or will called automatically.

After joining the groupsession data will be accessible at the Properties page (teachers only).

When all students are done they need to leave the groupsession.

Finish
Once a groupsession is complete you need to finish the groupsession manually.

Click View - Groupsessions. Select the groupsession to finish and click Finish. The groupsession will now move to Completed groupsessions.

The software expects all students to be ready or to be explicitly excluded in the groupsession. Otherwise the software will warn you before finishing, like this: