Technique 4: Facilitation Strategies for Group Learning Activities

Assigning your learners group activities doesn’t mean that you can sit back, relax and drink some coffee. It’s necessary to factor in the time it will take for your distance learners to organize themselves, do their work, and then prepare to share and present it, so be rigorous in your time scheduling to ensure student success.

Other key responsibilities you have as a facilitator during the execution of the group activity are:

• explaining the purposes and process of group learning tasks
• coaching learners by helping them develop skills or find resources they need for their group learning activity
• monitoring progress of group learning
• providing ongoing feedback to each group
• enabling groups to solve problems that might arise

Group projects facilitate learning as a social process, as team members observe and model behaviours and attitudes to learn in collaborative environments, which is a skill that is highly transferable to the working environment.

The design of successful group projects should include a detailed group project outline which should include:

• clear goal statements: what are the goals and expected outcomes (deliverables) for the project. Projects are compromised when the team fails to see the objective and purpose for the work.
• clear assessment guidelines: learners know exactly how they will be assessed and what is expected of them. They can judge for themselves the validity and fairness of the assessment guidelines. If they believe the assessment if flawed, they will not engage in the work.
• phased approach: Group project is structured across several phases with deliverables due at different times
• suggested group management processes: how the group may work together, how the work can be divided by the team and how the team will report to the instructor.
• suggested implementation timelines: how frequently the group checks-in with each other and the instructor. This keeps the team on task and prevents procrastination, especially if there are reminders throughout the course when each phase of the group project is supposed to start.
• clearly defined due dates: milestones and final delivery due dates are clearly stated in a course schedule, course calendar and at certain points during the course, for example, in the introduction to one of the modules, there could be a reminder about the need to start working on phase 2 of the group project.
• clear assessment guidelines: Having a good grading rubric in place for each group project will go a long way to ensure effective group work.

Groupwork Challenges

Things don’t always go as expected, and you may need to intervene should there be a break-down in a group. This is not a rare occurrence.

Consider these situations:

• Learners do not see the point in the activity so they are reluctant, either to fully participate, or to even get started on the activity. They might not like it, they might not be prepared for it, or they might misinterpret the instructions
• A discussion gets off track so that it is no longer directed towards the original goal
• A group activity has a promising discussion but is not completed in the allocated time

Some ways to mitigate these scenarios may include alternative activities or ideas for intervening if a discussion goes in a different direction, for example. When you plan your activities, therefore, also think about some contingency plans should your online community not go in the direction you intended.

Other solutions to group issues might come about from the task design itself. Make sure that the task you have assigned them is centred around a clearly communicated and tangible outcome. When designing the task, begin with the end in mind and think about the steps students will need to complete together to achieve the objective. The task should be something students can’t complete independently and requires their collaboration with peers.

Another aspect of group work that you are able to affect is setting clear expectations. Set your expectations of students and include participation requirements (assessed or not). To prevent issues of students not participating, it helps to agree expectations of participation at the outset of a course collaboratively with students, e.g., by asking students to develop a participation charter that they write and against which they hold each other accountable.