Why use group activities in your online teaching?

It can be challenging to find ways to get our students to effectively work together in group activities when our teaching is being delivered online. However, the challenge of making group work happen is definitely worth facing. Teaching and learning research and theory tells us that it is important for students to socially interact, and moreover, getting students into groups can have benefits in terms of their motivation and confidence and can improve your understanding of how well your students are performing.

Designing for Learning Activity

I generally have a copy of Biggs and Tang’s ‘Teaching for Quality Learning at University’ around, and I often find myself referring to a quote they give from Thomas J. Sheull at the preface to the book,

“What the student does is actually more important in determining what is learned than what the teacher does.” (Shuell, 1986).

We have understood in education for a long time that we need to design our teaching as a means of facilitating student learning activity. And so, in our online courses, we take care to design learner activity into the teaching schedule – inviting our students to research, practice, evaluate, apply so that they are able to construct their learning and work towards achieving the intended learning outcomes.

Socially Constructed Learning Opportunities

Through learning activity, we enable our students to interact with the learning content, and to interact with us, the teachers. It is also crucial that we give our students opportunities to interact with each other. Through group activities such as discussion and collaborations, we move from inviting the students to individually construct new knowledge and skills into the social construction of learning.

In 1930, Vygotsky said,

“Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people, and then, inside the child … All the higher [mental] functions originate as actual relations between human individuals.”

People need social interactions to learn, and in online teaching, we need to find ways of ensuring that our students have the opportunity to interact with other learners in the course of their studies.

Improving Students’ Motivation and Confidence

For some students, the opportunity to interact with their peers can be highly motivational – it breaks the pattern of one-way delivery that may sometimes be the main mode of teaching in an online course, and it allows them the opportunity to socially interact in informal ways while still focussing on their learning. Further, there is a performative element to working on discussions or challenges with a small group of your classmates – in large classes, it can be easy to sit back and let other students speak up. When put into a small group, there is an onus in each individual to demonstrate their level of understanding, and also to try to keep up with the level of the group. If the task is clear, and the group are collaborative, then there is the opportunity, and the motivation, to help each other come to a shared understanding.

Another big factor in asking students to work on a problem or discuss the content of the lesson in smaller groups is that it gives them the opportunity to be confused or wrong more safely. In an online class (or any class), it takes a lot of confidence to be the student who admits that they are confused or have got something wrong. It’s very familiar in live online classes, that if the teacher asks, ‘So, do you understand’, only one or two students (out of the 25, 35 or 100 students in the class) will be the ones to say yes or no. However, if students discuss with their peers and identify that they share a level of confusion, it becomes much easier to admit that they don’t understand, and you may find that students have more confidence in asking questions or asking for clarification.

Build a Better Understand of Student Performance 

In online teaching, whether synchronous or asynchronous, there will tend to be a small group of students who ask and answer questions. They are the digital equivalent of the front row in your lecture theatre – the confident or inquisitive ones who will regularly speak out. There is a danger that we allow their responses to signal what we see as the level of understanding of the class. However, unless we find ways to get the ‘back of the room’ students – the less confident or less eager to speak out – to demonstrate their level of understanding, we may be leaving large chunks of the class behind.

By setting, monitoring and getting outputs from student group activities, you reach out to a larger number of the students in the class. The fact that they are in smaller groups necessitates that more students contribute, and so you can interact with more of the reticent students and tailor your teaching around their needs as well.

Managing Group Activities in Online Classes

Having said all of that, and believing very strongly that we have to find opportunities for our online students to interact with each other, I will also gladly admit that there are a lot of challenges in trying to effectively run group work for students who are not coming physically into the classroom. Challenges such as gaining motivation to participate, equality of contribution, occasionally managing disputes.

I will go on to think about these in my next blog post.