A much better group functionality is needed.

1) all students- if allowed to see other participants -must be allowed to see the groups too. And should be allowed to send messages to that particular group from within the course.

2) A group should med made open, so that students (belonging to the course) can enroll in them. And it should be possible to regulate how many students can be a member of a certain group

3) It should be possible to print lists containing the groupmembers

At present messaging is either on or off. I propose a '3rd way' whereby students can send and receive messages to/from teachers but can't send messages to each other. We tried, as I'm sure many schools have, to moderate the messaging but it's impossible as they just use them to IM each other when they should be working.

This suggestion could be further expanded to include allowing/disallowing messaging down to individuals and/or class groups so that it could be turned on for specific tasks.