Running Group Activities in Online Courses
Whether teaching an asynchronous distance learning course or delivering your course through live online classes, there are some commonly perceived challenges in asking your students to take part in group-based activities, such as whether your students will have the motivation to carry out the task, will there be equal participation within the group, how can you avoid disputes or disruption, and can you afford the time in class that the group activities will take up? I’ve previously blogged on the reasons why group activities are a good idea in your online classes. If we accept that, then it’s worth taking the time to think about how we can overcome these challenges to create really engaging and effective learning opportunities when asking our students to work collaboratively with their peers.
Group work in online courses
Group work in online courses – by this, I mean activities in which we ask our students to work collaboratively together, usually with a shared outcome: a problem to solve, a solution to find, an agreement to reach or something to create. These may lead to output such as verbal reports, presentations, worked solutions, written reports, poster presentations or any number of ways in which we get students to give evidence of their learning. The key idea is that the students work together with a shared purpose to provide evidence of what they collaboratively know or can do.
Make it goal-orientated
If you want your students to collaborate, give them a shared goal to work towards. This might be as simple as finding the solution to a short problem over 15 minutes in a live class or as complex as carrying out an in-depth business case study over several weeks. It is the output that will help focus the collaboration – the answer provided to the rest of the class, or the report on the case study that they submit at the end of the project.
Have very clear expectations
In all activities, it is much easier for your students to work if they clearly understand what your expectations are for what they should do. Think about letting them know very clearly:
What is the output of their work?
How long should they spend working on it?
How much work do you expect them to do? (e.g., word count, number of pages in a slide deck, number of minutes in a presentation)
What is the scope of the work?
When should it be completed by?
Are there different roles for different group members?
The clearer you are in your own thinking about what you want your students to achieve, the better you can lay out your expectations to them.
Scaffold the students into it
To overcome barriers of confidence, varying levels of contribution, difference in understanding of expectations and language challenges for second language speakers, it is very helpful to scaffold your students into group work. Throughout the semester, from the start of your module, you can begin to ask them to carry out tasks in groups. This may begin as simply as 10-minute tasks in a classroom to answer questions you provide or ice-breaker discussion tasks that help students get accustomed to talking to each other. You can then increase the complexity of the task and expected duration and outputs as you work through the semester. The key thing is that you show from the start that your expectation is that the students will work with others as part of the learning experience in your module. Through this scaffolding process, you will also give students the opportunity to gradually build up their group working skills such as turn-taking, sharing opinions, listening to each other and reaching share decisions.
Provide clear steps and stages
As tasks become more complex, they may well involve steps to reach a conclusion. In asynchronous distance modules, this will often involve stages of carrying out your own thinking or problem solving before sharing that with the group. In live classes, it may be that students need time to research and develop understanding before they can solve problems together. To help your students, you should lay out the steps or stages of the process that you expect them to go through and set realistic time frames for each step. If your students are studying online while also working full-time, it is unlikely that they will be able to go through more than two stages in a week (e.g., ‘Post your own answer to the question no later than Friday of this week, then work with your group to reach and agreed answer by Sunday’).
Monitor and facilitate
Group activities provide excellent opportunities for our students to work independently from their teacher with the support of their peers, socially constructing their knowledge and developing their skills. However, our role remains to ensure that the students manage to keep on track, collaborate effectively, maintain momentum and continue to communicate in an effective and polite manner. In our live classes, we should move between breakout rooms, prompting, nudging and keeping everyone on track. If students are using discussion boards to collaborate, we should be checking from time to time, monitoring and encouraging students based on their efforts. Just as with face-to-face teaching, we will occasionally have to intervene when students disagree or fall out and manage conflict as it arises. Luckily, motivated, well-directed and clearly supported students are less likely to be distracted into dispute.
Assess individual outputs
Assessing student group work is a controversial topic. Some academics swear by it, and some swear off it. The most obvious issue is that of coasting – students who don’t participate in the work of the group, yet, because the grade is given to the whole group, come away with a decent grade anyway – or oppositely that they are the student who puts in all the effort and feels that it is unfair that others should gain grades from their hard work. I definitely support the idea that collaborative group activity can and should be used as the foundation of some assessed work. However, my suggestion is always that you should assess the students' individual output from the group's collaborative work. For instance, the students may be asked to individually support a report on the work, and their contribution to it, or they may submit a reflective account of how the group worked and reached their conclusions.