Earlier this year we asked you to share in-class small group activities and your best advice on various details related to designing and managing group work. Here’s a set of activities culled from the submissions, along with recommendations on various aspects of group work.
Many online faculty add at least one synchronous event to their courses to provide students with the immediacy of a full-class interaction. But a central challenge of synchronous events is finding something engaging for students to do. One solution is virtual escape rooms (VERs).
“Welcome to class, and by the way, when you review the course syllabus, you will see that one-third of your mark will come from group work.”
For many of us teaching in a postsecondary setting, the course syllabus review that includes a component of group
It’s well known that group work benefits the learning process but also that learners can dread the idea of doing group projects. So, as online instructors, what can we do about this situation? Research shows that group projects in online courses are fraught with mixed
The traditional college assignment is seen by the instructor and nobody else. But having students contribute to Wikipedia gives them the pride of knowing that what they are creating will benefit others who use the information. For this reason I assign my upper-division courses to
Escape rooms have become a cultural phenomenon over the past few years. Groups of people pay to be put into “locked” rooms they can escape only by solving a series of clues. But now education is starting to use escape rooms in both face-to-face and
When students learn there will be group work in a course, they often let up a collective groan. Group work tends to leave a bad taste in students’ mouths due to their lack of understanding of group dynamics. If you plan to use group activities
Students can learn from and with each other in groups; that’s been well-established in the research. But student learning in groups doesn’t happen automatically, and it doesn’t happen regularly unless the group activity is carefully designed. The areas listed below identify the essential components of
If students don’t come right out and say they don’t want to work in groups, the nonverbal message comes through loud and clear. “Get together with those sitting near you. I’ve got something I want you to work on as a group.” Some students stretch
What’s the best way to put students into groups? It’s the first task that confronts teachers who want students to work together. And the best reply is one of those “it depends” answers. Here are the questions on which it depends.
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