Have students work together to investigate or brainstorm a question in a shared document (e.g., structured Google doc, Google slide, or sheet) or an online whiteboard, and report their findings back to the class.

Benefits

• Immediate view of contributions
• Synchronous & asynchronous group work
• Students can come back to the shared document to revise, re-use, or add information

Tools

• Google workspace (Google Docs, Sheets, Forms, & Slides)
• Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams)
• Cornell Box (document storage)
• Whiteboarding tools (Zoom, JamBoard, Miro, Mural, etc.)

Considerations

• Sharing settings
• Privacy
• Global access
• Accessibility

Ask students to post an answer to a question or share their thoughts about class content in the Zoom chat window (best for smaller classes). For large classes, ask students in Zoom breakout rooms to choose a group notetaker to post group discussion notes in the chat window after returning to the main class session.

You can also use a discussion board for asynchronous group work.

Benefits

• Students can post their reflections in real time and read/share responses
• If group work is organized asynchronously, students can come back to the discussion board at their own time

Tools

Synchronous group work:

• Zoom Breakout rooms
• Microsoft Teams
• Canvas Conferences
• Canvas Group Discussions
• Ed Discussion
• Campuswire
• Slack

Considerations

• Accessibility
• Time Zones
• Stable access to WiFi and its bandwidth
• Clear expectations about participation and pace for asynchronous discussion boards
• Monitoring discussion boards

Students retrieve and synthesize information by collaborating with their peers to create something new: a written piece, an infographic, a piece of code, or students collectively respond to sample test questions.

Benefits

• Group projects may benefit from features offered by shared online space (ability to chat, do video conferencing, share files and links, post announcements and discussion threads, and build content)

Tools

• Canvas groups with all available tools
• Microsoft Teams
• Slack

Considerations

Setting up groups and group projects for success may require the following steps:

• Introduce group or peer work early in the semester
• Establishing ground rules for participation
• Plan for each step of group work
• Explain how groups will function and the grading

Students submit their first draft of an essay, research proposal, or a design, and the submitted work is distributed for peer review. If students work on a project in teams, they can check in with each other through a group member evaluation activity. Students can also build on each other’s knowledge and understanding of the topic in Zoom breakout room discussions or by sharing and responding in an online discussion board.

Benefits

When providing feedback and critiquing, students have to apply their knowledge, problem-solving skills, and develop feedback literacy. Students also engage more deeply with the assignment requirements and/or the rubric.

Tools

• FeedbackFruits Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation
• Canvas Peer Review
• Turnitin PeerMark
• Zoom breakout rooms
• Canvas discussions, and other discussion tools

Considerations

• Peer review is a multistep activity and may require careful design and consideration of requirements to help students achieve the learning outcomes. The assignment requirements will inform which platform is best to use and the best settings for the assignment
• We advise making the first peer review activity a low-stakes assignment for the students to get used to the platform and the flow.
• A carefully written rubric helps guide students through the process of giving feedback and yields more constructive feedback.
• It helps when the timing for the activity is generous, so students have enough time to first submit their work and then give feedback.

Students can annotate, highlight, discuss, and collaborate on text documents, images, video, audio, and websites. Instructors can post guiding questions for students to respond to, and allow students to post their own questions to be answered by peers. This is a great reading activity leading up to an inperson discussion.

Benefits

• Posing discussion topics and/or questions for students to answer as they read a paper
• Students can collaboratively read and annotate synchronously and asynchronously
• Collaborative annotation helps students to acknowledge some parts of reading that they could have neglected otherwise
• Annotating in small groups

Tools

• Hypothesis
• Perusall
• FeedbackFruits
• Interactive Media (annotations on document, video, and audio)

Considerations

• Providing students with thorough instructions
• These are all third-party tools, so the settings should be selected thoughtfully
• Accessibility (Perusall)

Instructors can poll students while they are in breakout rooms using Poll Everywhere. This activity is great for checking understanding and peer learning activities, as students will be able to discuss solutions.

Benefits

• Students can share screen in a breakout room and/or answer questions together
• This activity can be facilitated as a competition among teams

Tools

• Poll Everywhere competitions, surveys, and polls facilitated in breakout rooms
• Zoom polls

Considerations

• Careful construction of questions for students
• Students may need to be taught how to answer online questions
• It requires appropriate internet connection and can experience delays in response summaries.