Instructor Support for Educational Systems

How do I use Lockers for Groups?

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In this article, the advantages of Lockers for Groups will be explained and it will be described how to set up Lockers. 

The advantages of a Group Locker

When you choose to divide your students into Groups to enable them to work together on an assignment, have discussions, and/or give peer feedback, it is important that they are able to efficiently communicate with each other. A Group Locker gives your students the possibility to quickly and easily share files with each other.

The advantages of a Group Locker

  • It is a group specific digital storage space of 1 GB (comparable to Dropbox) in which students can upload and save several types of files (documents, videos, images etcetera).  
  • All group members can create folders and HTML files to organize the contents of the locker.
  • All group members can download and edit the files in the locker allowing them to view, add additional information, and provide feedback on each other’s work.
  • The files in a group locker are only available to those specific students and cannot be made public.
  • All group members can see when and who last edited a file.

A group locker also has the tab My Locker. All the files that are kept in this locker are only visible to yourself and will be available in every course. We do not recommend the use of the personal locker as it has maximum storage of only 1 MB and is only accessible through a group locker. The personal locker should therefore only be used for small (group related) notes.

Setting up Lockers

  • Navigate to Course Tools  in the navbar of your course.
  • Click Groups. You will go to the Groups homepage.
  1. Go to View Categories and use the drop-down menu to select the group category to which you want to add a locker (the example above shows the group category Groupwork is selected, and the group category consists of two groups, namely Group 1 and Group 2).
  2. Click on the fold-out arrow next to the name of the group.
  3. Click Edit Category.
  1. Scroll to Additional Options at the bottom of the page and select Set up lockers.
  2. Click Save. You will now return to the Manage Groups page.

To go to lockers, click Edit Category again, which is below the fold-out arrow next to the group category.

At the bottom of the page you will see Existing Workspace. Below that will be the lockers you have created. Each group in the group category will get their own locker (in the example above, two lockers have been created: one for Group 1 and one for Group 2).

  • Click on Save or Cancel to return to the overview page of the group category for which you have created the lockers.

Files that have been removed from the locker cannot be restored by either the teacher or the students. 

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