The more we were discussing about collaborative online learning, the more we came back to group formations setting the tone. Obviously, assignment structures and formations set the tone as well – esp. how clear and relevant they are (Brindley et al., 2009), but let’s keep it to the group for now.
How people learn in groups depends of course on how satisfied they are with them in the first place. This goes to the extent that groups that are formed by students not only give them more buy-in to the task, but students are more likely to pick up the slack of social loafers in those (Aggarwal and O’Brien, 2008). While this is great for getting the project done, I wonder, is that what we want people to learn? In other words, isn’t this rather poor peer pressure?
There are lots of pros and cons of letting students choose vs assigning them to groups, as we outline in length in our group report to this task. While social loafing may be an issue in all of sorts of groups, somehow, the very nature of leaving out people, deliberately or not, is just less likely to occur if facilitators assign group members. At the end of the day, what this task made me notice is that social loafing worries aside, what matters is that everyone is included in groups. How else can we also make sure that we learn from one another?
Aggarwal, P. and O’Brien, C.L. (2008). Social loafing on group projects: Structural antecedents and effect on student satisfaction. Journal of Marketing Education, 30(3), pp.255-264.
Brindley, J. E., Blaschke, L. M., & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(3), pp.1-18.
