Group projects let students master the material, learn content at deeper levels, and practice working with others. Sounds good, right? But even offline there are some pros and cons, is it even possible to complete group projects online?
First of all, I want to say that I have nothing bad to say about the group projects in general. There are both pros and cons – it is believed, that such work can help students master the material and consider different perspectives, deeper understand the topic they are learning, practice their skills, etc. However, if the group work is designed poorly and is not managed properly, students are not going to experience these benefits at all.
I will not discuss the usual advantages and disadvantages of the group work here. The more interesting topic is, does this system even work online? I checked it last term and realized that it was a nightmare, and I would never like to experience it again. And, actually, not only me – but I’ll explain this later.
First of all, not everyone even understood how to find out who were your group members among all your groupmates from the course. I was lucky – one of my peers texted me and asked to share my phone number because she wanted to create a WhatsApp group for smoother communication. However, not every team was so lucky…
So, we created a WhatsApp chat. What’s next? We decided to divide tasks and choose who was going to be responsible and for what. One of the team members immediately said that he had no time to work on that, so there were only 4 students left. Another one appeared only once and completed the task (probably using ChatGPT and not even reading what the other students posted, because his essay was not connected with the previous data at all and used information that was not even mentioned in the given materials). The other three students completed their own parts – however, no one checked what was already done and the data had no connection with the previously finished work.
This could not be sent to the Instructor as the group project, and a lot of paragraphs had to be changed. Still sounds possible, but is it, really? Especially when one of the students does not understand his or her task, and doesn’t want to listen to others, and then, after completing the task in the wrong way, sends this work as the final version of the group project simply ignoring anything others say?..
That was a horrible experience and I hope that it will never happen to me again. I still have too much to say about this very long story of the online group project, but I’d better stop here.
P.S.: by the way, both students who disappeared at the beginning of the project, magically appeared right before posting it, asking what was the final version of the document. I’m not even surprised, huh…
By the way, some other groups mentioned that only 1-2 students were working on the whole project because the others never joined them. And this problem is impossible to solve online, unfortunately. You must send the project to the Instructor, if you want a good grade. Nobody cares whether you are the only active member of your team or not.