Create a class: every setting on the wizard, explained

Where

Groups page, Create group

How long

About a minute

You need

Verified instructor approval for a real class; a free account and the teacher portal for a practice one

Changeable later

Every setting: except the name of a real class

The Create group wizard is deliberately short. It asks two or three things, then puts you on a working dashboard. Everything else (which book, which chapters, how the reader behaves) is edited afterward, so you are never stuck answering questions about a class you have not met yet.

This page walks the wizard screen by screen and tells you what each field sets, what a new class inherits without asking, and the one decision that is genuinely hard to undo.

Where the wizard lives

Go to Classrooms. The Create classroom button sits at the top right of the page. There is also a New classroom button at the top of the teacher sidebar, and once you have at least one class, a dashed New classroom tile at the end of the grid. All three run the same wizard.

If you have no classes yet, the empty state offers two buttons instead, Create a practice group and, if your instructor approval is verified, Create a real group. Those skip the first screen and drop you straight into the path you picked.

Step 1: Practice group or real group

The first screen offers two cards. The navy header band counts your progress (Step 1 of 3), so you always know how many screens are left.

• Practice group, a sandbox that autofills with 18 synthetic students and weeks of realistic activity. Badged Recommended first. Nothing in it touches real student data.
• Real classroom, a live class with a class code, real students, and real progress tracking.

If your teacher access has not been verified yet, the Real classroom card is greyed out behind a padlock, with a Request access link to the teacher access form. The practice path stays fully open in the meantime, which is the point of it.

The practice group path

1. 1

   Name it, or leave it blank

   The Group name field accepts up to 120 characters. Leave it empty and the class takes the name of the scenario you pick: Demo Group: Mid-Semester, for example.

2. 2

   Pick where in the semester it starts

   Three scenarios seed three different activity curves: Demo Group, First Week (students just joined, only Chapter 1 attempted), Demo Group, Mid-Semester (varied progress, at-risk flags, full analytics) and Demo Group, End of Semester (most students complete, final assessments attempted).

3. 3

   Review the roster

   Press See your roster and the next screen lists every synthetic student by name. This is a preview, not a commitment, Back returns you to the scenario list.

4. 4

   Create it

   Press Create group. The class is built and you land on its dashboard.

A practice classroom carries a Demo badge on its card in the Classrooms grid and a Demo sandbox badge on its dashboard, so you will not confuse it with a live section.

The real group path

This path is a single screen with two controls.

1. 1

   Name the class

   Group name is required, up to 120 characters. The placeholder suggests a shape that works well: course, term and section, for example Accounting 101, Fall 2026.

2. 2

   Decide about releasing quiz results

   The checkbox Release quiz results to students sets the class's Answer support dial. Ticked (the default), the book's fill-in answers and the smart grader's expected figures reveal once a student has submitted an attempt; unticked, those values stay with you and the class works the problem. How the practice quizzes themselves are graded is a separate dial, Chapter quizzes, in Class settings afterward.

3. 3

   Create it

   Create group stays disabled until the name field has something in it. Press it and you land on the new dashboard.

You are not committing forever. The same choice lives on as the Answer support dial in Class settings on the class page, alongside the other class settings below.

Your group code is created with the class

A real group gets an eight-character group code the moment it exists. You do not generate it and you cannot pick it. It appears in the dashboard header labelled Join code, and again beside the invite controls as Group code. That code (or the invite link built from it) plus an email invitation are the ways students get in.

What every new class inherits without asking

Four reader controls are not on the wizard at all. They come from Your class defaults, the card at the top of the Classrooms page. Those defaults pre-fill every class you create from that point forward (practice classes included), and never touch a class that already exists.

If you went through the reader setup walkthrough when you first opened the textbook, the four choices you made there were saved as these defaults, and the walkthrough starts from a different set than the table above, so your card may not match it. Look at the card before you create a section if you want to be sure.

Each toggle on that card saves on its own the moment you flip it. There is no separate save button.

What the wizard deliberately does not ask

A new real group starts with no textbook attached. That is on purpose (the wizard stays short), but it means one more stop before students arrive.

On the class page, open Class settings and follow Customize chapters, quizzes & certification at the bottom of the sheet. The page is titled Customize this class and it holds three things the wizard skipped:

• Book, pick the textbook this class is built around, from a dropdown of the books available to you.
• QBO certification prep: the certification practice exams, on or off for the whole class.
• Chapters, show or hide individual chapters, mark the ones your class must complete, and reorder them with the arrows.

Nothing on that page is live until you press Save curriculum at the bottom. Pick the book first: the chapter list below reloads with that book's chapters, so any ticking you did against the previous book goes with it.

Choose the name you want to keep

This is the one field to get right the first time. A real classroom has no rename control anywhere in the teacher area. Not on the dashboard, not on the customize page. If you need a live class renamed, contact support and we will change it for you.

A practice group is different. Reopen the wizard, choose the practice path, pick the same scenario, type the new name, and it renames the class you already have instead of creating a second one.

After you press Create group

The wizard closes and takes you straight to the new dashboard. From there:

• Invite students opens the invite panel, one email at a time with Send Invite, Add whole class for a pasted list, Create accounts for students without usable email, and the group code with copy buttons.
• Textbook opens the class's own book and brings you back here when you close it. It appears once a book is attached.
• Needs you, By student, By chapter and View classroom trends fill in as students join and start reading.
• Class settings, in the header row, is where the per-class switches and dials live from now on.

On a practice group the primary button reads Use this for real instead, with a Reset data link on the far edge of the same row. Adopting takes the sandbox you have been exploring and turns it into a real section, asking for the details a live class needs.