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 videos designed to get new students 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/Owners can add any user to their groups, as long as they are a registered Echo360 user.
To access your groups:
- Click Groups on the top navigation bar.
- 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) have been given. All group members can view the media in the group. Group owners can control ALL aspects of the group. Media permissions for non-owner members can each be given separately, allowing members to:
- Add media to a group
- Share 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 Group Ownership.
Viewing Group Media
The most common group access privilege is View Only, meaning you have the ability to view the media that has been shared into the group. By default, the group opens on the Content 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 Content library. Shown below are the group player for both a video and a presentation.
The video 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 player has slide navigation controls that appear when you hover your mouse over the presentation, as shown in the below figure.
Adding and Removing Group Media
If you have been given content management privileges 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 have been given "Remove" privileges in the group, which allows you to remove media from the group. This is typically 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. The Add and Remove privileges are given separately however, so you MAY be able to Add media to the group but NOT remove it.
Group Ownership
If you created the group, you are automatically a Group owner. Group owners 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 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)
- Delete group
Owners can add other owners to the group, however, owners cannot remove owners or change the rights of other owners. Only an Echo360 administrator can change owner privileges to something less, or remove owners from a group.
NOTE: If an Administrator has disabled the Library for students, students can still participate fully in groups, to include creating groups and managing groups as an owner. 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 an owner, the add/upload permission is assumed and is checked in the members list, but the student has no method of adding media to the group.