Nugget #16: Facilitating Teamwork

Why is it important to allow teamwork?

It is important to help students learn in teams outside the classroom for thereby we provide an alternative format of mastery-based assessment. Research has found peer learning to be beneficial to students in many perspectives and students with disabilities are more inclined towards casual teamwork asynchronously.

The common formats of teamwork

  1. Group work on homework assignments such as machine problems.
  2. Quizzes completed in groups during course TA-supervised discussion sessions.
  3. Asynchronous teamwork enabled by course learning management systems (LMS), such as Canvas, PrairieLearn. Typically, these LMS facilitate group set up and grading methods.

Dig Deeper:

Below are examples of these various methods on different platforms.

On Canvas: 

  1. Teamwork using the Graded Group Discussion: this facilitates flexible modalities of assignment contents and diverse methods for submission and deadline customization. This is particularly important as a UDL design for students with disabilities. 
  2. Teamwork using the worksheet type of new Quiz on Canvas: this is particularly good for flipped class instruction.

On Prairielearn:

The instructor can set up quizzes that enable teamwork using the following information in the information .json file: “groupWork”: true, “groupMaxSize”: 4, “groupMinSize”: 1,    “studentGroupCreate”: true, “studentGroupJoin”: true, “studentGroupLeave”: true,

Links to specific examples:

  1. Canvas Graded Group Discussion Link
  2. Canvas Worksheet quiz for groups Link
  3. PrairieLearn documentation on group work Link

Research about teamwork

See you again next week!

-UDL and Accessibility Group
https://publish.illinois.edu/udl-accessibility-group/
gcoe-udlgroup@illinois.edu