Goal setting is valuable for all learners, but can be especially relevant when trying to tie work or professional development goals into an online course.
Examples
An example task that can be easily applied across contexts is to ask learners to roughly draw something - a practitioner (scientist, counsellor, teacher, carpenter), process, theory etc. Then ask them to identify what crucial parts make up that thing.
Tip: Giving learners a set number of crucial things means the task requires cooperation and negotiation.
Note: You could also do the above as an audio.
For those new to (or nervous about) group work, you could set up the final output to be individual.
You could support learners to do the planning (one of the parts that requires the most negotiation) in class for execution of their roles at home.
If your class is fully online you can still do group breakouts, you might just want to use group talk channels instead. And, if you would rather have one person submit for the whole group, there's a way to do that too using group assessment and zapier.
How to support better collaboration
Concerns about group work often relate to how to ensure everyone in the group contributes. Here are a few tips to help that:
Keep groups as 4-5 people, so there's less room to "hide".
Use meaningful team roles that relate to the content and to the task.
Give learners a short form where they evaluate their own contribution as well as and the contributions of each other group member.
We think that useful collaboration relies on tasks that require collaboration. You want the learners to benefit from being part of a group. So, whenever you're thinking about collaboration, ask:
Would a learner learn just as much if they did this task on their own?
Would it take them longer?
Perhaps in some instances you can come up with low-stakes collaboration. Something that doesn't require a lot of editing and refining.
Learn more: Check out our blog post Stop asking learners to post once and reply twice for more ideas on how to get genuine discussion and collaboration.
Benefits
Including group breakouts in your online course allows...
Learners to realise the benefits of collaborative learning. There's loads - greater support, diversity, positive views of themselves and others, critical thinking and problem-solving.
Learners to practice cooperation and collaboration skills that will serve them well in many other areas of their personal and work lives.
Learners to have their collaborative efforts recorded and stored within the course (rather than with one individual on paper which is easily lost).
Variations
Combine peer teaching and cooperative learning with the jigsaw method (each learner learns a piece of a whole and combine in a group to learn the whole).
Give learners a dilemma or contentious issue, and ask them to come up with a solution. This could be a case study scenario or just a quote from someone with strong opinions relating to ideas in your course. Issues get learners thinking about the topic from multiple viewpoints which broadens their understanding. For collaboration, you might want to look for convergence in discussion. Asking: "What is the root cause of this issue?".
Give learners an idea, approach, article or video then ask them to evaluate it with each learner setting particular criteria. They could be evaluating it on accuracy, effectiveness, whether it should be trusted and so on.
Use collective wisdom to have learners work together to create a summary sheet for a topic that they can all use for study or assignments. This could be in the form of a mind map (or similar) or infographic. Having a useful resource at the end of their work should be a good reason for learners to engage.