This resource is useful for staff who are planning group work online. The resource is relevant to synchronous small group work using live audio-visual technologies (e.g. Zoom, Google Hangouts) and text-based/visual synchronous or asynchronous small group work using Moodle wikis, discussion fora, Jamboard etc.
Manage group work online
Small group work supports collaboration, facilitates more wide-spread participation, encourages learner-autonomy, helps students to develop communication and teamwork skills, provides opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and peer support, and builds and sustains a sense of a learning community.
However, in remote settings, constructive small group work is harder to facilitate and moderate and comes with distinct challenges. For example, students may be unfamiliar with each other and with online group work, and online communication can encourage a sense of anonymity, informality and unmoderated directness. This resource offers some recommendations and presents good practice in managing these and other challenges and creating positive, consistent and effective online group work learning experiences.
Some groups meet on a one-off basis, others for a longer period of time. Apply the suggestions below in a way relevant to your intended groupwork activities.
Prepare students for online group work
Ask about their previous experiences of group work (be it online or on other settings), including what tips they can share and what they found challenging.
Establish this online space as professional, collaborative and collegiate, with a set of expectations and a code of conduct.
Incentivise investment by communicating the personal and professional value of the skills involved in online group work.
Encourage students to check their mood and notice that 'bringing' negative feelings, such as tiredness or anxiety, is more likely to lead them towards negative interpretations, such as perceiving criticism where none was intended. Stress the need for self-awareness, patience, respect, understanding and consideration of the (possibly hidden) needs, concerns, challenges and constraints of others.
Clarify that some students may have specific needs or disabilities that they may wish not to disclose, and all students should welcome and act on each other's requests for communications and materials to be shared in particular formats, for some students to need extra time, and so on.
Setting groups
Small groups of four or five individuals allow for diversity of students. Seven or eight students in a group can facilitate a sense of anonymity and enable one or two students to make less effort. Two or three in a group increases the risk of one disruptive or disengaged student significantly impacting upon the rest.
Consider arranging students in different groups for each unit of study.
Review Individual Support Plans (ISPs) for issues with group work and support students/provide alternative options where feasible.
Facilitate increasingly collaborative, effective group work
Set icebreakers through which the students de-anonymise and ''humanise” themselves, e.g. "share one thing you think you are good at (cooking, guitar-playing, learning languages) and one thing you struggle with (small talk, singing, apostrophes)".
Set small, manageable, fun initial tasks, to help students develop trust in each other and in the group work process. This can involve experimenting with the technology they might use (e.g. which team creates the best 'hand drawn' collaborative picture on Jamboard), or they could compete in a team quiz on a topic related to the module, for example.
Progress from more independent, individual learning to more interdependent and authentic collaboration. For example, in an initial activity, the tutor could allocate different variants of the same task to each student: they work independently, then they share their findings with each other to compare notes. Together, they agree which is the most interesting/significant finding to share with the wider group, or debate how those findings should be categorised, ranked, organised etc. (e.g. discussing aspects/characteristics of the findings/data). Students more experienced in online group work might, by contrast, collaboratively shape the task and determine its components, negotiate roles, actively augment each other's contributions etc.
In setting online group work tasks, clarify the goals and the output, and their relationship to the module learning outcomes. Set expectations (e.g. time spent on the task), suggest distinct milestones to support progress-monitoring, and clarify the deadline and how the output should be shared/submitted.
Expect some group 'off-task' time: this serves a social, team-building function and breaks are necessary.
Provide a clear means by which students can collectively ask for help or support, either with the task or with the group dynamic (at PG level, potentially from another group rather than the tutor), and/or a means by which students can individually, privately communicate reflections on the group dynamic, to guide tutor moderation, refocusing, support etc.
Ensure all relevant activities are added to the Student Study Plan for the module in question.
Raising students' awareness of each other's needs, constraints and challenges, and encouraging peer accommodation of accessibility-related requests, facilitates a more inclusive and accessible teaching and learning experience.
Review ISPs for issues with group work and support students/provide alternative options where feasible.
Ensure all relevant activities are added to the Student Study Plan for the module in question.
All online resources should be compatible with the UK Digital Accessibility Standards 2020. See Creating Digitally Accessible Learning and Teaching Materials Brookes Moodle course.
Use the Blackboard Ally tool to help check the accessibility of the content you have prepared (available within Moodle late July - early August 2020).