Student Groups
From ElateWiki
One of the more challenging aspects of teaching online involves the use of student groups. Student groups require a fair amount of instructional attention. There has to be coordination and some supervisory oversight (especially at the undergraduate levels). Oftentimes, group strife will arise because of non-participating team members or personality clashes. Sometimes, group members may have to be moved. However, there are many benefits to student group work in online courses.
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Rationales for Student Group Work
According to constructivist concepts, learning and sense-making are co-created through intercommunications and collaborative work with others. The creative frictions that may spark between learners may enhance the quality of the learning. Learners may synergistically enhance each other’s level of creativity.
A critical outcome of group work involves an enhanced ability to work with different personality types in a civil and constructive way.
Online courses may range from a small size of a half-dozen learners to a high of hundreds of students. Instructors may have a need to make an online course more intimate. The use of small student groups enables easier classroom management because of the smaller sections that may be supported by graduate teaching assistants or newer faculty.
Grouping Learners
Faculty may use learning / course management systems to randomly divide learners in groups. Others may choose familiar students in a particular program to be in their group, and they may then divide the others among other teaching assistants. Some use alphabetization to list names. In face-to-face courses, instructors would often be able to combine teams based on learner personalities and interests. This may be done in more sophisticated learning environments with in-depth learner profiles that may enhance the mixing and the matching. Another approach is learner self-selection of each other or of particular topic-based groups to participate in based on learning interests.
A critical point is to try to be fair in the grouping—for the richest learning possible for all. Another value is to make sure that there is a sufficient number of group members or “critical mass” to ensure the survival of the group.
Dyadic Teams
In more practiced online classes, dyadic teams or partnerships may be used. These may be local geographical partners who may share research work, for example. Or they may be accountability partners who are participating in a jigsaw to share learning with the class.
Student Group Technology Tools
Various learning / course management systems (L/CMS) offer a variety of student grouping tools. These student grouping tools offer ways for people to “brand” their groups with particular looks-and-feels and names. Group members may email each other singly or en masse. They may launch software programs for synchronous interactivity through web conferencing tools (to share digital artifacts, interact using voice and text chat and web cams, to annotate shared documents, to remote-desktop to other locations, and to access shared digital information). All interactions may leave a digital trail. Instructors may visit student groups and collect data-mined information about the interactions; however, most student groups are invisible to other course members.
Types of Shared Assignments
Instructors use a range of group assignments. These may involve discussions around shared areas of learning. There may be presentations. There may be research. Student groups may go on field trips. They may conduct shared experiments. They may strive to launch business plans. They may co-design a snippet of a technology system. They may co-create a Web site.
The Evaluation of Group Work
Instructors have a variety of ways to evaluate group work. Some use rubrics that describe the quality of communications, collaboration, and then the final end product. Others bring in peer evaluations to evaluate how group members treated each other and how much they contributed to the project.
See Also
Angelo, T.A. & Cross, K.P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Ch. 47: Group-Work Evaluations. 347 – 351.