Parent sites can be useful in managing large courses with many sections, or a program that has a central site.  

For example: Course ABC1234 has 15 sections.  There are three TAs in this course who are each managing five sections.  There can be a parent course called ABC1234 and then three child courses (Sections 1234,2345,3456; Sections 4567,5678,6789; Sections 7891,8912,9123).  TAs are assigned only to the sections they manage. The content, announcements, communications, etc., can take place at the parent course level.  Graded items and gradebooks will be housed at the child course level.

Or another example: The Nursing program has a site where all nursing students get information and communicate with program administrators.  This site would be the parent site and each of the 15 Nursing courses can be child courses to the parent site.

Note: Participants will only access the sites in which they are enrolled.  So in the Nursing example above, students would only see the nursing courses in which they are enrolled, and the parent site.  They would not see the other Nursing child courses in which they are not enrolled.  In the ABC1234 example, students would only see their own child courses and the parent site, not all three child courses.

Note: Permissions for adding or deleting rosters in a given site may vary depending on your system's institutional enrollment implementation. In most cases, adding rosters by class or section is subject to automated roster updates.

Groups are subsets of participants for a given worksite in UVaCollab. Groups can be created on an ad hoc basis by instructors in course sites or by owners or administrators in collaboration sites. Groups are useful to organize study groups, project teams, and other non-official subsets of worksite participants. In course sites, each course roster section behaves like a group. i.e., group-aware tools recognize the section as a group.

You can use groups to make site content available to specific site participants.  For example, a private announcement can be made available to a group and email notification can be sent to members of that group.  You can also use groups to create group assignments, or limit access to a test or quiz with settings for specific groups.

For information on creating and editing groups, see How do I create groups?

WARNING: If an assignment or assessment has been released to groups, changing which groups have access to the assignment, or modifying or deleting a group after students have begun work on the assignment or assessment can result in the loss of submissions!

The Tool Menu can be customized by the instructor of the course to modify the order or appearance of menu items in the site.