Groups - How Groups benefit your Students

In future educational and employment settings, students will be expected to work collaboratively with others. The classroom, either online or in-person, is a great place to help students develop their collaboration skills.

Here are some of the advantages listed in the article Group Work in the Classroom Links to an external site. from the Center for Innovation and Teaching:

 Advantages:

• "Students are able to take ownership of the subject matter."
• "Students develop communication and teamwork skills."
• "Content is reinforced as students work together and 'teach' each other. This improves understanding through additional discussion and explanation."
• "Students can work together to pool their expertise, knowledge and skills."
• "Students hold one another responsible and accountable."

In Canvas, the Groups features automatically provides each student group a separate space for their own announcements, files, discussions, collaboration, etc. The instructor has access to every group space.

Groups can be used in discussions to create a more manageable number of student responses for them to read and reply to. It can be more beneficial to have a conversation among 4-6 students, versus trying to read and respond to 30+ responses.

Groups can be given more challenging assignments that benefit from combined effort.

Some instructors provided opportunities for students to give feedback to the instructor on their group members level of engagement and activity for accountability.