Groups are designed to bring specific groups of people and specific sets of media together.

Groups can be more formalized, such as a group created by an instructor who wants to provide video media that is related to but outside of the scope of a class.

Groups can be very informal, such as a group of upper-class students forming a "Freshman Help" group, with presentations or interactive media designed to provide new students with information and help on a variety of campus resources or topics.

Echo360 Administrators control who can create groups, with the ability to endow Students, Teaching Assistants, or Instructors with group-creation powers separately. Group creators (who are automatically Managers) can add any user to their groups, as long as they are a registered Echo360 user.

To access your groups:

1. Click Groups on the top navigation bar.
2. Click on the Group tile to enter the main group page.
   

What you can do inside of a group depends very much on the group permission(s) you have been given. All group members can view the media in the group. Group managers can control ALL aspects of the group. Media permissions for non-manager members can each be given separately, allowing members to:

• Add media to a group
• Share/Post media from a group
• Make a copy of group media
• Download group media
• Remove media from a group

Use the links to access help articles with more information. The below sections of this page briefly discuss the basics of viewing, adding, and removing Group media, as well as an overview of Managing Groups.

Viewing Group Media

All users in a group can view the media in the group. The Reviewer access level is given if the member is only allowed to view the group media. By default, the group opens on the Media tab, as shown below, where you can click on a tile to open the group media player.

The Group media player looks very much like the media details player you would see if you clicked a media tile in your library. The below figures show the group media player for a video and for a presentation. Groups can contain audio, interactive media, and polls as well.

The media player for groups has the same navigation as you'd expect in any player, with play/pause, fast-forward/rewind, timestamp, and playback controls such as volume and speed/quality settings.

The presentation view has slide navigation controls that appear when you hover your mouse over the presentation, as shown in the below figure.

To open the group media player, click on any tile in the group's Media page, shown below.

Adding and Removing Group Media

If you have been given Add Media permissions in the group, you may see an Add Media button on the Group page. This allows you to add media into the group for viewing by all other group members.

You may also have been given "Remove" privileges in the group, which allows you to remove media from the group. This is often conferred along with the Add & Upload privilege, allowing that group's members the ability to both add and remove media from the group as needed. But Add and Remove permissions are given separately. So you MAY be able to add media to the group but NOT remove it.

Managing Groups

If you created the group, you are automatically a Group Manager. Group managers have full administrative rights and privileges over the group, including the ability to:

• Add members to a group
• Remove members from a group
• Edit member privileges in the group
• Add media to a group
• Share/Post media from a group
• Make a copy of group media
• Download group media
• Remove media from a group
• Edit group details (title and/or description)
• Clone a group (includes all media)
• Delete a group 

Managers can add other managers to the group, however, managers cannot remove other managers or change their permissions (demote them from full manager permissions). Only an Echo360 administrator can change manager privileges to something less, or remove managers from a group.

NOTE: If an Administrator has disabled the Library for students, students can still participate fully in groups, to include creating groups, managing groups and posting media from the group into their LMS/VLE. However they cannot add or upload media to the group, as doing so requires access to their Library (anything a user uploads goes to their library; Echo360 accesses it from there). If a student is a group manager, the add/upload permission is assumed, but the student has no method of adding media to the group.