September 20, 2010 How to Design Effective Online Group Work
Activities There are many reasons why students don’t like group
work, and in the online classroom the list of reasons grows even
longer as the asynchronous nature of online courses not only
makes collaboration more difficult but almost counterintuitive.
In addition, there may be another issue at play that you haven’t
even thought about, and it has to do with how group work is
designed in the first place. “Too often we give students an
activity and call it group work when in reality it’s something
they could do on their own,” says Jean Mandernach, PhD,
associate professor of psychology at Grand Canyon University.
“Then we get frustrated when they don’t work together and just
do the work on their own.” In the recent online seminar Online
Group Work: Making It Meaningful and Manageable, Mandernach
provided tips for adapting proven face-to-face group work
strategies to the online environment. The key is to design tasks
that are truly collaborative, mean