When are group project-based workshops best?
Although students may initially dread having to work in a group, it can be one of the most fruitful learning experiences of their education, and, not only do they learn about a topic or skill, they also practice working in a distributed environment, much like the one we work in today in our cloud-based, global workplace.
To avoid frustration, though, it's important to carefully choose how and when you have students work in groups. If you know your students have widely varying schedules, live in different time zones, and have variable access to high-speed internet, you may need to give them certain guidelines so that they will not lose patience with each other, or with the infrastructure and the course itself.
Group projects work best in the following situations:
- The students need to show competency in the same thing (for example, how to build a tiny home).
- The students do not have a lot of time, and the outcome needs to be very concrete and focused...
