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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Group Project

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In online courses, group projects have two (2) benefits: 1. Helping students connect with one another, which helps counteract potential isolation 2. Providing the experience of working on distributed teams, which an increasingly common requirement in the workforce • Group projects in any course can bring challenges. • Poorly structured group projects can cause problems that erode students’ motivation and performance. Online group work may be an intimidating concept. Group projects present challenges including: • Arriving at a consensus: a. Providing the opportunity to work on such projects in an online environment can either help address those challenges or exacerbate them b. Depending upon an instructor’s design and maintenance of the …show more content…

8. What will the roles of your group members be? Will you have a leader? An organizer? An editor? 9. What will you do if a group member misses a meeting? 10. What will you do if you feel a member is not pulling his or her weight? 11. Who will ensure that you meet assignment deadlines? Tips for Creating Your Group Project • Plan how to form groups and handle membership changes. a. When forming groups, think about learning goals and decide how to handle students dropping the class or requesting a new group. • Emphasize the importance of group work skills. a. Repeatedly emphasize the real-world value of the skills students can gain from working in groups. b. Stress the added value of learning to work on geographically distributed teams. • Provide early team-building opportunities. a. Give project teams time to get to know each other socially, develop a team identity, and work together on a low-stakes task or problem before starting a large, high-stakes project. b. Consider using icebreaker activities early on to help students get to know one another. • Discuss common teamwork problems. a. Discuss or role-play problems that commonly arise on teams (e.g., a dominating team member, a teammate who doesn’t return calls) b. Brainstorm how to address them. • Establish team contracts. a. Ask teams to draft and agree to a contract governing team members’ responsibilities regarding communication, meeting attendance, the respectful exchange of ideas, and so on. b. Provide a

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