How groups work

A group holds the sessions for one class. Open one and you get three tabs.

When to use it: When you want class-level insight across several sessions, or you’re wondering what a group actually gives you.

Sessions

Every session in the group, in one list. This is the tab that solves the original problem — finding one class’s work without scrolling past every other class you teach.

Insights

Insight across the whole group rather than one session at a time. This is where class-level patterns show up: what a class has consistently found difficult across several sessions, rather than how they did on one.

It covers both understanding and engagement, and it does not use AI — nothing in this tab is premium.

It needs more than two closed sessions in the group. Until then there is not enough to compare and the tab will have little to show. Sessions also have to be closed to count, so a group full of sessions you never ended will look emptier than it is.

And the group has to be set up properly. Group insights are built from the sessions in the group, so a session you forgot to put in one is missing from the picture. If a class’s insights look thinner than you expect, check the Sessions tab first — it is usually the sessions that are missing, not the data.

Members

Everyone who has taken part in a session in this group.

Both signed-in students and guests appear here, as long as they took part in at least one session in the group. Using guest join does not keep a student out of the members list.

One caveat if your class joins as guests: guests are not reliably linked from one session to the next, so treat the member count as a rough picture of who has taken part rather than a class register.

If a group looks empty or incomplete

Almost always the sessions, not the group. A session only belongs to a group if it was put in one — either when you created it, or by creating it inside a Canvas course, which groups it automatically. See organising sessions by class with groups.