- Good morning, everyone. Welcome to today's presentation on facilitating group work in an online or hybrid course. I'd like to start right out of the gate by opening up some breakout discussions for all of you and asking you to join me in some brief reflection right at the start here. One of the reasons I was really excited about hosting this particular workshop that our team is putting on is group work is something that our students are gonna continue to work with throughout their professional lives. It's something that they need to figure out, and it's going to impact them for the rest of their lives. And this also means that you all likely have your own personal experiences about good and bad collaborative exchanges that you've had. So, I've got a couple questions here, a brief discussion prompt. And I'm gonna open up some breakout groups, breakout rooms here. And once you get into these breakout rooms, I just want you to spend a few minutes discussing these questions. I also wanna note that, since this is the first thing we're doing, we'll likely have a few people joining us partway through this. So, you may have some people that just kind of get dropped into groups mid conversation. I'm hoping that you can roll with that and get them up to speed, and everything can run as smoothly as possible there. But just kinda wanted to give you a little heads up that that probably will be happening. So, I'm going to set the timer for this for 10 minutes, so it'll be a pretty brief discussion, but I'd like you to just talk a little bit about your best group work experience, your best collaborative experience. What did that group look like, what made it special? And then, as a group, I want you to kinda synthesize all of the experiences that you're all sharing with one another and come up with three descriptive words for what a good group experience looks like, right? That's all we're looking for is just three descriptive words, all right? And I'm gonna go ahead and open the rooms now, and I'll see you back here in 10 minutes. All right, welcome back. Our main room is getting repopulated as groups are closing. So, thank you all for participating here. And as you kind of file back into the main room here, I'd ask for one person from each group to just go into the chat dialog, and enter in the three descriptors that your group came up with, just so we can kinda get a sense of the collective thought process of everyone that's here with us this morning. Great, so some of the descriptors that are coming in already, I'm just gonna read a few of them as I see 'em, communicative, equitable, not equal but equitable, strengths focused, camaraderie, enthusiasm, motivated, purposeful. There's a lot of really great, great sense and great kind of common understanding of what this looks like. Respect, fun, structure, trust, accountability, cooperative, all of these are fantastic descriptors of high quality group experiences. And really all of these are the things that motivate us to do group work in our courses, shared goals, ability to generate knowledge, share a commitment to the goal. Thank you, everyone. This is fantastic, sense of purpose, leadership, safety. Absolutely, all of those fall under this big broad category. And the next thing that I'd like to talk about is the benefits of doing group work, right? There's so many benefits, and I think the descriptors that you all just generated yourselves, really speak well to what those benefits look like. I also wanna just kind of add on a little caveat here that group work probably isn't right in every single case. It's important for you to think through if it's an appropriate fit for your course or not. I'm not gonna be able to tell you whether it is or not, but we'll talk a little bit about what some of the best group work projects have in mind and hopefully that can help you kind of think through that for yourselves. So, first let's talk a little bit about the benefits of collaborative or cooperative learning, right? So, I'm putting these into three big categories here. The first would be task oriented benefits, right? Many hands can make light work, but if it's not facilitated appropriately, that's not always going to be the case. So, we'll talk more about the dangers and how we can avoid some of those in a moment. Right now, we're just talking about benefits. So, distribution of labor, multiple perspectives means that you can have projects that are broader in scope, projects that require more diverse skill sets because you have multiple students involved. And it also means that you'll have, hopefully, if groups are working effectively, higher quality work, because you'll have internal review processes within that group before the final product actually comes to you for your review, right? There's also benefits in peer instruction. This is a model that has been discussed quite a lot. I know there are lots of people at this university who use the peer instruction model. And for good reason. Having students teach one another means that they're going to be able to communicate in a language that is more familiar to them. Whereas, when you're the primary distributor of information and you're the one telling students all of this stuff, there may be a bit of a cognitive disconnect, because you're an expert in your area, and you may struggle to communicate in a way that novices in your field can connect with, right? So, by tapping into this peer learning model, we can kind of bridge that gap a little bit. So, some of the things that come along with that, when you're working in a group, there's kind of opportunities to explain reasoning that are germane to that process, where students are communicating with one another, their rationale for something that they did in a project. There's also some positive interdependence, where I'm relying on you and you're relying on me. But it's all for the greater good of this project that we're building together, right? So, there's kind of a sense of community that gets formed around that. And then, there's also individual accountability. I know that if I don't do my part on this project, I'm gonna be letting down other people in very concrete ways, right? So, setting this up at the outset is really important, making sure that everyone in the group understands their role, and that their role is irreplaceable, right? That we can't just shrug it off or treat it as though it doesn't matter. Everyone has a very concrete role to play. And then, the last category I've kind of alluded to a little bit already is that this group work, it's a lifelong skill. It's something that your students are likely to take with them, in many cases, even more so than the content of your particular course, right? Being able to work effectively, collaboratively is something that everyone needs to know how to do on an ongoing basis because so few people work in complete isolation. Almost everywhere, you see people working together to solve really big challenges. Those really big challenges can't be solved independently, right? We need to have multiple perspectives being brought into those conversations. So, those are the benefits. Let's talk a little bit about some of the dangers, and I've got a bunch of memes here, because the dangers are funnier, right? There's way more goofy things that we can bring in here, right? There's lots of bad experiences that people have had with group work, and I'm sure that you all have bad experiences with group work that you could reflect on as well, right? I had you reflect on good group work experiences at the start. I'm not gonna have you reflect on bad group work experiences, but I trust that they all exist, and that you all are able to empathize with this, right? So, in some cases, this can come to how responsibilities are distributed and how reliable your team is. So, we have our big meme right in the middle here that talks about really ideally, when we're establishing group work, we wanna have that be about teamwork, but if it doesn't work well, it can lead to students being rather jaded. And it might be that it probably is that if you're approaching group work this semester, you're dealing with students who are already jaded, right? Who've had bad group work experiences in the past, and we need to acknowledge those and address those, and reassure our students that we're doing everything we can to make sure that this group work experience isn't going to be a repeat of those group work experiences, that we're doing our part for that. But then, we also expect them to do their part, and to work with their groups to establish these types of things. And we'll talk more about what that looks like shortly. There's also a lot of personal feelings that get mixed up in providing and receiving feedback from one another. So, one of the things you'll see as we talk about the structure that we can provide around a group project is how to put feedback processes into place early on, so that when feedback needs to be provided, when something doesn't meet the standards of one person in a group, there's a reasonable recourse around that and that students don't feel offended to receive that feedback, that that feedback is truly coming from a place of wanting everyone on the team to grow, wanting the group's project to be the best that it possibly can be. And not from a place of my way or the highway, right? We don't want anyone on our teams to be acting as a dictator amongst their peers, right? This does need to be a collaborative effort. And I think that that also speaks to the meme in the lower right hand corner, where we've got just a hard line distribution of labor. I'm gonna do this part, you do that part, and then we'll just stitch it together, and you get the Frankenstein project where there's clearly discrepancy between the caliber of product that's created by one student and another within this larger unit, right? So, when we're thinking about right now, we've got lots of complexities in our world, right? We have lots of things. And we know that there are these dangers about group work. So, why would we be taking on this additional burden right now? I think for me it's because people are still feeling really isolated and because these skills are still relevant. We're continuing to see people working remotely, I know our team, the Center for Transformative Teaching, has had tighter collaboration over the past few months than we ever have before, partially because we've kinda had to rise to meet the need that we're facing right now. But also, it's something that our team's really been explicit and intentional about, making sure that channels of communication are continuing to be open there. I think that this is every bit as important of a skill now as it was before. So, if group work is something that fits into your course, I'd kinda caution you a little bit about stepping away from that as a responsibility or a germane part of your course right now, just because there are these additional challenges. I think we need to talk about 'em. I think we need to address those challenges and make sure that we're providing reasonable structure, so that the barriers that are in place aren't insurmountable to our students, make sure that we kind of have a reasonable glide path for students so that they can follow that pathway and establish procedures within their team that won't lead to a lot of frustration, right? I also wanted to mention an article that I read from "Inside Higher Ed" in the middle of last week. There was a survey that was sent out to, I think, 1,500 or so students, asking about what their experiences were in the spring semester. And overwhelmingly, students were frustrated with how things kind of played out in the spring. Everyone was shifted to remote teaching. I also wanna note this is not a institution specific study, this was kind of a national survey that was sent out. But 65% of students who said that their satisfaction with the spring semester was diminished cited that the primary reason for that was that opportunities to collaborate with other students on coursework were lacking in the online or remote course, right? That doesn't necessarily mean, I kinda wanna caution you from thinking, oh well, we've gotta do group work then. There's also a lot of collaboration that just kind of happens inherently when people are on campus, where they can form ad hoc study groups. So, that particular piece of data doesn't necessarily mean students want group work. In fact, I think there's enough kinda bad blood around group work that you'll probably still see the same kind of raised eyebrows, even though you won't necessarily see those raised eyebrows if you're just talking about it asynchronously, but you'll probably see some of that hesitation with your students still. But I think that desire for students to collaborate with one another does still speak to a need to step forward and provide, at the very least, opportunities for collaboration in our courses, or at the very least, revisiting the way you're articulating your expectations to your students and letting them know when and where they are welcome to work with other people, right? That's something that you may not have been as explicit about previously. But given the context we're moving into this fall, I think it's important to be as explicit as we can wherever we can. So, as we think about what we can do to avoid bad group work experiences, I'll go over a few strategies here that you can use to address each of these three big categories. But, ultimately, the big differences that we'll see this fall are a need for additional considerations around the technological mediation of collaboration, most of which can happen through Zoom and Canvas groups. And we'll do some technical demonstrations at the end of this as well. Let's see. So, fundamentally, because our students will be less reliably present, there's a greater need for us to explicitly think through and encourage proactive collaboration if we're expecting our students to engage in this way. Does this mean that there will likely be more housekeeping work? It does, so it's important that you talk with your students about the purpose of this to avoid a sense of frustration over additional busy work. So, the three categories I'm kind of putting these recommendations into are preparation, orientation and accountability. And we'll go through each of these one at a time with some specific recommendations in each one. So, when we start thinking about preparation, the biggest piece, as I've alluded to already, is that we make sure that group work is actually important to your course. What exactly is the reason that you're leaning into group work? Do you have a task that is so big in scope that individuals can't do it? Is it important that you have these multiple perspectives being brought into play? Talk with your students about why you're asking them to engage in this group work so that they know what they need to be bringing into that conversation, right? When we think about group formation, there's also a tendency to kind of curb the student frustration around group experiences by saying, "Tell you what, I'll let you pick your groups," right? I completely understand where this is coming from. I would caution against it a little bit. While students often appreciate that opportunity and that flexibility to choose their own groups when they're going into a group project, self selected groups are also most frequently cited as bad experiences of group work. Students don't necessarily recognize, they may have a group of friends that they're taking the class with that they enjoy spending time with as friends, but don't necessarily recognize how and why the group isn't working properly in terms of completing the project that you're asking them to complete. So, I and the research as well, would kind of caution against allowing students to form the groups themselves. Another consideration is thinking about the size of the group. If really ideally, you're looking at groups of about three to five people. If you get much larger than that, it's easier for students to kind of blend in amongst the masses and not have that same kind of personal accountability where I have to do my part or other people on the group will be let down. And if you go smaller than three, if you go down to two, really, you just don't have the same diversity of thought being brought into the project. If you have a particularly large project, I would also say these numbers aren't concrete by any means, but if you're going above and beyond that five people per group threshold, I'd think really carefully about what kinds of roles you're expecting students in those groups to play, and maybe even concretely spelling out what those roles are and asking students to select those particular roles or work with their groups to identify strengths within that group and align those strengths with the particular roles as well. We also know that we wanna foster a diversity of thought within these groups so that we do actually have a good exchange of ideas in that environment. So, there's been a lot of different research, and I'll share some resources toward the end of this presentation with kind of the receipts for a lot of this as well. But there's been multiple studies about how groups are formed, and groups based on student grades, or based on gender, or ethnicity, or what else? Let's see, lots of different factors have been brought into consideration there. I do wanna make one note about forming groups based on grades. Generally, the research shows that you'll see better performance across the board if you're doing distributed grades rather than segregating grades. That is to say, if we are using grades as a factor for forming these groups, you're better off, you'll see better gains if you use kind of a distributed approach for forming in that manner, rather than saying, all right, all of the A students are gonna work together, all of B students working together down the line. Especially amongst the middle and lower end students, you'll see a lot better gains if they're able to connect with students who are really excelling and understanding the material. And if you're breaking those groups out based on grades, you're not going to see that same kind of cross pollination, that peer instruction just doesn't come through the same way, right? And I've got a question in chat privately, and I'm happy to chat with people about those later, we'll have some q&a at the end. But some of that may also be that we need to look at those particular studies and kind of dig in a little bit more specifically as to what's happening in each of those instances. But generally, when we're talking about diverse group sets, the one thing that has been shown to be fairly reliable is forming groups that are diverse based on ethnicity, right? Based on background in that capacity. That tends to be really valuable. But the one thing I would caution about that is you don't want to, if you're working with a class of let's say 20, and you have five students who are from minority backgrounds, or are a different gender than the rest of the classroom, you really don't want to put one of each of those students in each group, because then you end up forming minorities in each group, where none of those people feel like they have anyone else who's sharing their perspective, and they just really quickly get overpowered, outnumbered. It's not a great dynamic, so be cautious around that if you're taking this into account when you're forming your groups. All right. So, putting that into play, we've got our preparation section. The next one we'll deal with is orientation, and then accountability. So, for orientation, this is actually an area where I've had some anecdotal experiences I'd like to share. Dr. Amanda Gonzalez is an accounting professor in the College of Business. She ran a group project this spring and wanted to focus explicitly on making sure students have a strong foundation for the group work. Myself and Casey Lindy, the assistant director of the College of Business Teaching and Learning Center, joined Dr. Gonzalez's class for an orientation session. We used one class period to open up dialogues with and between students about their attributes of good and bad group work experiences. Many of the things that the students identified would have been things that we talked about anyways, right? They came to the same types of conclusions that you all did in the activity we did at the start of this session. But having those conversations and asking students to generate that themselves helps to raise buy in. Having it come from the students also gave them a sense of autonomy, and really set the stage for how they were going to be working with one another in their group experience. Let's see, we also used that kind of as a segue into a team charter, asking the students to outline what they were expecting from one another, both in terms of policies and how the team operated, but also in terms of distribution of tasks and responsibilities in that project so that there was an equitable distribution of responsibilities. And that was this spring, right before we made the transition to remote teaching. And when students did group evaluations, which is a fairly common function or a fairly common piece of group work, one of the comments that Dr. Gonzalez remarked, she saw repeatedly, was that groups were very quick to talk about how strong their group's communication continued to be even in light of the changes that they were going through in the spring. So, to help you guys with this, if this is something that interests you and you'd like to replicate in your own space, I've also created a module that I've shared in the Canvas Commons, and I'll show you that in a little bit. But this module includes a resource page about how to use the group's space in Canvas. A couple of discussion boards, one on group practices and one on task distribution, and then a formalized team charter activity, and a distribution of responsibilities activity, as well as a individualized conformation quiz that asks students to individually say whether or not the artifacts that were created in those previous assignments are a reflection of consensus amongst the groups, to give them an opportunity to say if they feel their voice wasn't necessarily represented in what was turned in by the group. So, when we're thinking about orientation, a couple recommendations I'd have here is to start those conversations as generalized as possible, right? If you immediately jump to what are our team's policies, I think it's really easy for that to move into a space where students feel as though they're being probed, they're being judged in advance for their performance in that group activity before they've even begun that group activity. So, if we're able to start generalized and keep it non personal, people can talk about experiences they've had in the past. This is a really good way to kind of raise some of those potential issues and allow you to address them without it getting to be kind of a personal budding of the heads. We also wanna use this orientation to talk about the individual expectations. What does each person expect going into this group project? What are your goals, what are my goals and what are the group's goals as a whole, right? If you have a goal of achieving a particular grade on this assignment, and I have a goal of developing skills in a particular area, we need to make sure that we're talking about all of those and that we can find some agreement in terms of how those goals are being balanced. We also wanna talk about process and product. And this is really going to factor into just making sure we have clear interpersonal dynamics within those groups. And we talked a little bit about the group expectation and individual expectation dynamics already. So, jumping back to our chart, we now have how do we make sure we're putting our students on a path for success? Discussing previous dynamics, establishing the goals and expectations for this new group, and I'll show you those resources shortly here. The last piece we wanna talk about is accountability, and this is where the big challenge of social loafing comes into play. I know everyone's concerned about what this looks like. A couple things we can do to help address that is incentivizing not just the final product, but the process of getting there as well, having some check in moments along the way, where students are maybe explicitly asked to review their team charter and discuss amongst themselves if they feel everything's being adhered to, if they feel they need to amend that charter in any way, shape or form. I think also having just a very transparent and deliberate distribution of responsibilities from the outset of that project is an important aspect of how we maintain some accountability. If you're being incredibly transparent about that, it also gives students recourse, and structure and framework to raise that discussion with you if that need arises right? I think we really wanna encourage them to address those team challenges without involvement of the instructor if we can. But having that framework in place gives you some clear documentation about what those expectations were. You can also see when those expectations were established and have some reasonable and humane discussions with people who may be struggling to meet those expectations. There's lots of reasons that individuals might be struggling to meet expectations that they even set for themselves as we go into this fall. So, let's keep that in mind. But having some structure around that, I think is really valuable. You can also help to raise some accountability by having individual tasks that are related but not part of the group project. So, for instance, this could take the form of, if you were doing a large scale report of some sort, you could have each student write their own executive summary that represents the whole of what's being worked on and asks them each to do their own piece so they have to have a broad awareness of what's happening in their project as a whole, but then they're each individually responsible for that executive summary. I think it's also worth at least a brief mention at this point to talk about why you might have the group project grades be weighted and differentiated amongst group members, or everyone ends up getting the same grade. And I think, at least for me, this approach feels like the most appropriate one where the group project is everyone's getting the same grade, because it represents how well your team was able to collaborate and coalesce. But then there's individual accountability built into these other pieces along the way, right? Making sure that you have some amount of individual accountability and you're not putting the weight of that group project and the performance of that group project on to just a couple people in that group. I think making sure channels of communication between the students and yourself to discuss any areas of conflict within the group is also incredibly important. Just treating students like adults as much as possible. Helping them kind of work through these challenges, yeah. I think I'll leave it at that. So, when we're dealing with accountability, this is what that looks like. I think talking about your reward structures, making sure that you have points allocated to both the final product and the process leading up to it, I think is really valuable there. I'd like to now share a few of the resources that we drew from, that I drew from to generate this, as well as when I was working with Dr. Gonzalez this spring to do the orientation project. And I'll share these slides out with you. You can't click on these links right now, I recognize, but each of these is a link to resources that incorporate a lot of research that's been done around group work. And they've done a much more thorough job than I have here of showing all of their receipts along the way. So, you can kinda dig in and interrogate in the areas where you are a little bit hesitant about if that particular research would apply to your context or not. And then, for the rest of the session here, I would like to kinda dig in and do a little bit of a demonstration of the technical resources that you'll likely be using if you're using group works in your particular class. But before I do that, I'm gonna go ahead and stop screen sharing and take a quick look in chat. I see there was a fair amount of back and forth here, which is excellent. There's some conversation around CATME, which is a resource that's available to, I believe every college except arts and sciences right now. It sounds like there's some discussion happening in chat about CATME. For those of you who are unfamiliar, CATME is a technical resource that you can use for a lot of different aspects of the group work process. It can be used to form groups with specific intentions in mind, if you wanna form groups around strengths or around availability, or any number of factors, you can use this to survey students early on, and form groups in that capacity. And then, there's also structures built into CATME for evaluation of group procedures along the way. It's a really robust tool. There's a lot that you can do with it. It also gets a bit complex. I'm not planning on demonstrating that tool in particular today. But if that's something you're interested in, feel free to reach out and I can get you into contact with someone who knows a little bit more about that tool than myself. Let's see, and it looks like that's a lot of what's happening in discussion. There was a final question that came in about, is grading necessary to incentivize the process and the product? I think that some amount of value being put on that is important to get students engaged in, at least initially. So, when I was putting together the the module that I mentioned a moment ago, I did put a nominal amount of points on each of those different activities, the discussion boards, and the team charter and the team task list. I think it is important to have some point value at play, otherwise students are likely to shrug it off, even though it is a fundamental and incredibly valuable piece of just having healthy group dynamics. So, hopefully, you don't have to put a lot of value on it, because it is ultimately about just making sure that they are functioning well together as a team, and there should be a lot of intrinsic value that students find from that. But we do need to provide a little bit, oftentimes, just to get them in the door. All right. So, I'm gonna go ahead and start sharing my screen again. And I have a Canvas course up right now. So, this is my sandbox, and this is where I've created that module that I mentioned to you guys a couple times. But before we get into that, I wanna talk about forming groups in Canvas and what the tools look like around this. And to do that, we need to go into the people page of our course. And you'll see we have this group's tab. I'm gonna zoom as well. I think my screen ends up being a little bit small for people. So, we have this groups tab right here. And when we click on that right now, I don't have any groups created. So, it gives us this mention of what groups do in Canvas, what this means. And I'm gonna go ahead and create a group set. And we'll just call this group project. And I'm gonna split students into three groups. I have a fairly small enrollment in my course. So, I'm just gonna do three groups. And I'll save this. And it's going to randomly assign students when we do that. And if I clicked on the little triangle next to each of these groups, I can expand that and see who is in each of these groups. And maybe at this point, I know that I have a group where there's going to be some interpersonal conflicts and we need to rearrange people. I know that, for example, Eric and Jillian are always at odds with one another. They're really not, they're my colleagues, they're awesome, and they always get along. But if there's some dynamic there that we need to avoid, it's really easy to just drag and drop a student from one group to another to readjust those groups, right? So, now we've got the groups established. I'd like to now show you how we can use these groups to set up a group assignment or a group discussion board, right? So, if I jump back to modules, this is where I have all of my pieces. You may also have these in assignments or discussions in your course. But I have kind of all of that compiled into this one module. So, we have reflecting on past group work experiences. This is the first discussion that I asked my students to do in this group orientation. And I wanna make sure that this is a group discussion board, not a class wide discussion board, that each group kind of has their own space, their own instance of this discussion. So to do that, I'm gonna edit the discussion. And right here, where it says group discussion, we've got this box checked. Well, if it's not checked, you don't see all of the other details. You'll see this pretty frequently in Canvas where it'll expand to show you more options under something. So, when we check it, we see group set. And this is where we actually have all three of those groups in one set, that's just called group project. So, I'm gonna select that group project set, and save that discussion. And what we now see is up at the top here, it tells us that since this is a group discussion, each group has its own conversation. And we can click into each one of those individually to see the discussion that's happening within that one group, right? But then there's no kind of cross pollination between these groups. Everyone has their own distinct space. So, you may find it valuable, depending on your own context to have a class wide discussion where people are able to report back kind of what their individual groups talked about and share ideas between different groups. Depends on what your context looks like. But that's how we align a discussion board to a group. I'm gonna jump back to modules and go into the team charter assignment. This one's a little different because it's an assignment rather than discussion board, and it functions a little differently in that capacity as well. With the group discussion board, each student is still graded individually for their contributions. With a group assignment, and I'm gonna go ahead and we've got our box checked down here, telling us that this is a group assignment, I'm gonna select that group project set again, and you'll notice that there's this checkbox right here for assign grades to each student individually. So, by default, if we don't check this box, when we grade one student's submission for a group project, everyone in the group gets that same grade. You can check this box, and then each student will be graded individually. But if you're working with the larger course, that also means that you lose a lot of the efficiency that comes along with grading the group as a whole. So, the recommendation that I give for this is to start by leaving this unchecked. After students have submitted their group projects, you can set the terminology they use now is manual grade posting, right? So that when you put grades into the grade book, those don't necessarily get pushed out to students immediately. If we have the manual grade posting policy turned on rather than automatic grade posting policy you can do a lot of grading internally, and then decide when you wanna push those out to your students, all right? So, if you leave this unchecked and say assign grades to the group as a whole, you can go through and grade those groups, and then you can come back in, edit this assignment and check that box that says assign grades to each student individually, and then go back to the grade book and adjust those instances where grades need to be adjusted outside of what the group as a whole got. Does that make sense, hopefully? If it doesn't, feel free to chime in in chat, and we can talk about any of that more. But there's also a question that came in in chat that I'm gonna try to address now. If you assign the same grade to all students in a given group, and then later move a student to a different group, does the student's existing grade in the grade book on earlier group work stay or does that existing grade change to whatever their new group earned on that prior assignment? This is a really great question. Changing groups gets a bit messy. So, if you change groups midway through a project, let's say you're talking about the process and product, and you've got a student that was working with group A early on, and then they switch to group B later, rather than using the same group set, you're better off duplicating that group set and kind of having a clear division of before and after, right? So, there was this early part where students were working together, and that student was in group A, and then maybe you have some shift partway through, and you just make a new group set all together. And that way, the grades from the previous pieces would stay the way they were rather than being updated. If you don't do that, I think it does shift to be what their new grade group had earned on that earlier piece, even if they weren't working with that group earlier. So, yeah. Oh, I'll save this and I'll show you where that is in the people page. You can go to that group project. And there's a clone group set option right here. So, you can make that duplicate, and then move people around in that new group set, rather than the existing one. If you do that, you just need to make sure that you go into all of the future assignments, all of the things that they haven't submitted yet, and make sure that each of those assignments is set to point to that new group set, rather than the old one, right? I hope that answers your question, Carolyn. It's a little tricky. All right. So, when we create groups, this also makes a space for students to collaborate in. And I wanna show you where you can find that so that you can kind of check in and see what drafts students are working on or what kinds of conversations they're having around a project. So, from this people page, we've got our groups listed out here, and maybe I wanna see what Amy's group is working on. I can click on this Options button right here and click on Visit Group Homepage. And then, this is from the instructor side, this is what it looks like. There's a home space, there's announcements pages, people, discussions, files, conferences, collaborations. It's a lot of the same stuff that you've probably seen in your courses in Canvas, right? It's a lot of these same menu items. But if we go to the people page here, it looks a little different, right? Here it's showing us just the members of that particular group and the teachers for that course, right? Students also have the ability to create discussions within their own group space. They can upload files and share files within the space. They could even start a conference. There's a conferences tool directly in Canvas, it's not Zoom, it's a big blue button, but it's built directly into Canvas. So, if students come in here and click plus conference, they can establish a conference within their group, and choose which members of their group need to be invited to that. And then, the last one is collaborations, which is really common if your students like to use a shared Google Doc or a Office 365 shared document, rather than if we drop files into the file space, we can't have multiple people working on a document at one time, and that's kind of a here's the current draft, and then I'll take it from there. So, passing of the baton type of thing, instead of everyone on the same document at once. So, it may be that they end up using this collaborations space as well. But this is how you get to it. I think it's important to know about this and talk with your students at least a little bit about how they can access this space and what they can do in there. And if you have any particular expectations about which of these resources they're using, it's important that you articulate those expectations to them, right? If you're expecting them to share drafts of their project in a particular space so that you can review those, make sure you're being explicit about that. A couple more questions that are coming into chat. And I apologize, I'm sure I'm missing some of these. Let's see, so a question about the team charter assignment. Yes, absolutely, we'll share it with you. I'm actually going to show you how to import that from Commons in just a moment here. Talk about how students view their group homepage and what they can and can't do on there. Absolutely, and I'm doing it . So, the only thing I didn't really show you here, that I'd like to show you, I showed you how you access it as the instructor. But just so you know, students will access it from this new button that will show up in the left hand navigation of Canvas for them. You may or may not have this on your Canvas. This button doesn't show up until you are in a group in the course, right? So if we click on groups, it tells us the names of all of the groups that we are in. So, I just see group A, and I think this is one reason you might wanna think about when you're naming your group set, using something that has a class identifier in it as well, right? Could be that it just has your class number, followed by whatever you wanna call it, so that when students see this list, if they're in a lot of different groups in a particular semester, it's really helpful to be able to quickly see which one they need to go to. If everyone names their groups group project, this becomes a challenging and frustrating experience for the students. So, having a unique identifier in there is helpful. But this is how students would access their group space. And this is what it looks like. I'm actually a student in this particular one. So, I could make an announcement and say I've uploaded this, here's what's going on. In fact, I did that here. I said, here you go, "I've uploaded our project tasks list "to the file space. "But wanted to make sure to make an announcement "for quick access." They can also make pages in Canvas. I don't know if this is something many of you have tinkered with on your own, designing pages within your courses, but it's a nice way to compile lots of different files as well as online resources into one space. And these are actual also something that everyone in the group can edit easily in that space. Students can also access that people page, see who's in their group. I mentioned that they can add discussions too. The next thing I'd like to talk about is some of that accountability throughout the process, right? And one of the things that's getting talked about, one of the Canvas functions that it's getting talked about quite a lot these days is appointment groups. And this is gonna be valuable for lots of people in terms of determining which students are going to attend an in person class on a particular day of the week, but it's also a really good way to set up a structure for groups that have check ins with you. So, we do this actually from the calendar. I'm gonna click on Create New Event. So, the calendar is over in the left hand navigation. Click on the plus here, and along the top, we have this appointment group tab. And if we select our calendar, and have my Steven sandbox as the course that we're working with. And we have another little checkbox right here that says have students sign up in groups, and we can use that same group set that we established in the course. And maybe this is I forgot to check in. And then, you've got your Zoom Room. Whatever that Zoom Room might be is the location. And then, you can divide out and have little like 15 minute check ins with each group, and students can sign up for these meetings and you know which groups are scheduled to be there. You can also limit each time slot to just one group so that you don't have multiple groups claiming the same slot, right? So, this is a really great way to kind of provide a little structure and make sure that you have that check in built into the process for some accountability along the way. All right, now I'll go ahead and show you where you can, if you're interested in that team charter module that I created and published to the Commons, you can go to Commons in the left hand navigation of Canvas. And I've just called it group orientation. And there's a module right here, group orientation. If you click this, you can actually go through and look at what is in each of these before you bring it into your course. You can see the prompt and what type of object it is. Let's take a look, see if it meets your needs. And then, you can use this import slash download, and select the course that you wanna add this to. So, this is gonna be a course list for you. My course list is massive and intimidating, but yours hopefully isn't quite as long as mine. But that's how you bring it into your course. Once it's in your course, you're welcome to edit it and do whatever you need to do to kinda make it your own and make it your tone of voice and fit for you. And, in fact, there are a few places where I've highlighted and put it into italics, kind of some recommendations for what you need to do with this. And one of the things that you will need to do if you choose to use this module is make sure that you set each of these assignments up to be a group discussion board and group assignment in your own course, right? Any questions about how to pull this in from Commons or find this at all? Otherwise, I'll go ahead and move on. The last thing that I wanted to talk about was actually with respect to Zoom and how we operate in this space, right? There's a lot of value in group interactions and having some synchronous interactions incorporated into this. And you can do breakout groups like we did this morning that are randomly distributed. But if you really want to have groups meet within your Zoom session, you may wanna have some breakout rooms pre established. Depending on your class size, this may be pretty easy if you're working with the class of 12 or so, like the example I was showing. That might not be a challenge at all, and you can kinda just manually quickly assign those 12 students to their three groups, and no big deal. But if your class is larger, I think it's also worth noting that you can prepare those groups, those breakout rooms in Zoom in advance. So, I've got this meeting actually right here. And if I click on edit this meeting, under meeting options, we have this breakout room pre assign option. And there's even an import from CSV file that lets you, let's see, here, this is what the CSV template looks like. Let me zoom in a lot. All it is is the room name and the email address of each person that you wanna have going into that room. So, getting these email addresses may just be as easy as having students register for the Zoom section early in the class, like we did this morning, so that you have a sense of what email address they use when they access the Zoom Room. You can download that report, and then use that to distribute students amongst these breakout rooms in advance. So, you set up a CSV file that looks something like this. And then, you can import those breakout groups using that CSV file and have them pre established, so that when you come into the Zoom Room, it's quick and easy to just say, hey, those breakout groups that I told you we're gonna use today, we're using them now, right? That's what that looks like. There is a limitation of 50 breakout rooms for a total of 200 participants. So, if you are crossing that threshold, if you're teaching a really high enrollment course and trying to do group work, you may run into some problems there, but 200 students is a pretty high threshold, right? All right, with that, I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing. If there are, I'll take a look at chat and try to field a few questions there. But if there's more questions, you're certainly welcome to turn on your microphone and raise those questions as well. I may not have all of the answers. There might be a few things that we need to kind of dig in and do a test run of group spaces are one of the trickier corners of Canvas. So, some of it's just gonna be, well, let's try it and see what happens.

- Steven, I do have a question. I don't know there's a good answer for this, but I have tried using Canvas to do group work, a case study that they would do, all right? What I find sometimes is the students will drop the class. So, then they're not in that group. And I've actually had groups that have ended up being one or two students. And I just adjusted how I graded them. But sometimes I actually want the information about how the groups do, right? To say hey, I did do a group thing for this class. Do you have a suggestion about how to handle that? It may not be a good one. I'm just asking in case you have an idea.

- How to handle students who...

- Same issue of can I move them into another group? I don't think in Canvas it's easy to do that with the grade, the way the grades are done. So, I don't know .

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Because that poor student right ?

- So, in terms of addressing that concern, I think that talking about the group project early and framing out your rationale for it are important factors there, and I'm kinda trusting that you're doing some of that already. In terms of how to handle a student potentially dropping your course as a result of group work and feeling overwhelmed it.

- Yeah, I think it's other reasons, I think they have personal stuff, all kinds of things that they have to drop the class. I don't think it's because of the group work, but unfortunately, it impacts the assignments I've made for people in groups. Yeah.

- Right, right. I guess one thing that I would think about, and certainly when I'm forming groups, I try to err on the side of making them that larger end of the three to five threshold, so that if you have one person leave a group, it's not a big deal. I think also having some early discussion around it lets you quickly adjust and see. I know that also a concern around late adds to the course, kind of the reverse challenge of that. And it is a really good idea to, in your course, keep an eye on that group set. So, I'm gonna share my screen here again and show you what that looks like. So, if you have students who are late additions to the course, they'll oftentimes be over in this left hand space, and you just need to add, drag them into the appropriate group, right? And maybe open up communication with the people who are in that group saying, I'm adding this person to your group, so that they all know what's going on and how to get them up to speed, so to speak, with what their group's doing. In terms of reallocating people, are you talking about a project that spans the entirety of a semester, or?

- Usually I wait till after the first test to make this assignment, so they have the basic material. And so, yeah, I have parts of it. And they do that, not the whole, but I would say a good maybe half of the semester so that not right at the end, some weeks before the end, I would have them turn that in so that they can get that grade and know where they stand, coming into the final. So yeah, it goes over I would say at least a month or four weeks of parts of it.

- Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just gonna be to lean toward the high end of that three to five range, so that if one person leaves, it's it's hopefully not as devastating to the group, right?

- I've been fortunate that in the one case where it was one student left, they were very responsible. So, they did a good job, they just couldn't fully engage the teamwork part.

- Right.

- That was the part of the point, the big thing about doing it, so yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, I know my colleague, Amy Ort is here. Amy, do you have any thoughts on how you've addressed this in the past?

- [Amy] I was responding to something in chat so I was not listening to that question.

- No problem, no problem at all. Yeah, chat's been hopping. The question, if you wanna chime in about it, was about how to handle students who maybe dropped the class partway through a group project and kind of making sure that everything still flows as smoothly as possible.

- Yeah, that's where, as somebody suggested in chat, if you can wait until a week or two have passed so that things stabilize, I would absolutely not create any kind of permanent groups until after that add drop period is over, because you're gonna have folks coming in and leaving. If you can even wait for a little bit after that, that works well also. This is also where making sure that your groups are three to five people so that hopefully we're only losing one person per group, if you really are in a situation where you started with a group of five and you're down to two, that's where you might have to combine some groups, or maybe think about changing the requirements for that group project, specifically for that group. So, are there pieces that you can maybe pull out for that group, if it really is, I can't be mixing things together because this is a thing they've been working hard on, that's where maybe we have to build in some wiggle room in the project requirements.

- Thanks, Amy, appreciate it. Sorry to cold call you. And lots of chat, lots of questions being raised in chat as well. I'm gonna pull on a couple of those and just talk about them so that people watching the recording can catch those if they aren't seeing the chat alongside it. There's a question about if you do random breakout rooms in Zoom is it possible to send people back into the same random breakout room again within that same meeting? And the answer's yes, absolutely. So, if I open the breakout rooms menu right now, I actually still see the breakout rooms that I put you all in at the start of this session. And I could put you back in those breakout rooms right now. The only place where it does get a little bit complicated is if I wanted to have you meet with the current breakout rooms, and then go to a different breakout room and then revisit the original, that's gonna be really challenging to do. At that point, you need to have your breakout rooms predefined, predetermined in the Zoom system. But if you're using the same breakout rooms throughout, that's not a problem at all. Another question about the 200 person limit on breakout rooms, only relevant to preassignment, i.e. if I have more than 200 students in Zoom simultaneously can I still assign them to groups randomly? I believe so, I think we ran into this with one of our summer institute sessions. And we were able to randomly assign more than 200 participants to breakout groups, but not through preassigned. I do think that the 50 groups limit was still at play, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I think that that limitation was still at play, but I don't think the 200 person limit was. But keep in mind also that we do still have a cap on our normal Zoom Rooms of 300 participants. So, that's another limitation that's at play in this space. Will the groups we create go away from students group tab once we unpublish the course, slash when the course ends, or is it possible they would end up with a lot of different groups listed from various semesters? So, this is a great question, and it's one that I've actually played around with a little bit. So, one, you can't unpublish the course at the end of the semester. Once students submit work, you can't unpublish it the same way you can prior to the semester actually starting. And you can conclude the course at the end of the semester, and that will remove those old groups from the left hand navigation. I believe that if you set an end date, it will also remove the old ones, the ones that are past the end date from the group's menu in that space as well. But we don't know how many people are actually going through these processes of ending their courses and concluding their courses, and setting end dates. So, regardless of all of that, it's a really good idea to make sure that you have kind of a clear naming convention on your group set. But I think it's great that you're thinking about that and wanting to make sure that you aren't adding to that clutter for students. So, good question, thanks. Yes, you can absolutely create multiple group sets. There's also flexibility within those group sets to let students self select which groups they go into, if you wanna do that. But again, be cautious about that particular option. All right. Are there any more questions this morning? I know it's kind of just a lot, and until you have something where you can work with it, it's all kind of who knows what questions you'll come up with, right?

- Hey, I have a question.

- [Steven] Yeah.

- So, usually I teach a course in which I ask students to do sort of small tasks, small math problems, I teach math courses in groups, or turn to a partner and talk about this in groups. And so, it may be the case that I'm teaching a course where a half or a third of my students are in person and the other half or two thirds are online. And so, I'm just kind of thinking about how do you imagine that sort of collaboration happening. And then a kind of a setting where maybe I say, work on this small task, or I say talk about this real quick, I can kind of see some benefits for using a group discussion in Canvas. But I'm just thinking what other sort of ideas, maybe, have you thought about around that, and also would there be an expectation, and then that students are all bringing laptops to class and can get on the internet, and sort of what are your thoughts around that, I guess is what I'm wondering?

- Yeah, around a little micro scale, micro scope group work of just I want you to work through this quick problem together, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- I think discussion boards can be a piece of it, but it sounds like mostly you're thinking about synchronous activities where students would be doing it in real time in the classroom. At least, that's how you've historically done it. I think you can continue to provide those options, and it might be that you say, we're gonna do this in class, and I'll divide you into breakout groups if you're attending through Zoom. Could also be that you'd have students bring laptops to class and then you can have a little bit more than just, we're all doing it through Zoom at that point. But, yeah, I think you'll kinda have to play around with those different options a bit yourself. But I think between doing some in the classroom interaction of turn to your neighbor and talk about this, depending on the size of your class, may be feasible to do, and forming ad hoc breakout groups in Zoom to discuss something, should be able to help address a lot of that. Is there a particular scenario that you're thinking of that you're concerned about how that plays out?

- Well, so are you imagining that the students who are in person would also have their laptops open and have Zoom open at the same time?

- I think, if you wanna make sure that there's cross pollination between the students that are in the classroom and students who are attending via Zoom, yes, you almost have to have that. If that's not a critical component for you, if you can just say, if you're in the classroom, work with someone who's in the classroom, if you're in Zoom, work with someone who's in Zoom. I think that's a perfectly reasonable approach, and probably logistically, easier to manage than trying to have every student makes sure they bring a computer with them to the classroom, so that they can join via Zoom, right? Yeah, I think either way can work. It's just kind of what the logistics around it look like.

- This is Anna, I have a kind of a related question. We typically have students form their own group, study groups as you mentioned, sort of not pre assigned, the professor has nothing to do with, they choose their own students. They're all students who wanna collaborate with. And I'm just wondering, when we have these hybrid courses now where group A meets on this day, group B meets on another day, about how to facilitate this for students. Normally, they'd meet somewhere in the college and find their own space or meet at each other's homes. So, I'm wondering about using Zoom or what tools would you suggest that we suggest to them for now doing that same kind of collaboration where we're sort of out of the process, but that's a good way to meet?

- So, I think, for me, I would lean into Zoom and the Canvas group tools as much as possible. But I, if I'm working with a group of students on something like this, I almost always leave it up to them and say what, as a group, decide what platform you wanna use to connect with one another, right? I think it's important for us to kind of have the institutional one that we were familiar with and can recommend if they are kind of just we don't know where to go, we don't know what platform we wanna use, but in most cases, I expect you'll see students gravitate toward we'd really like to work in this space. So, unless you're expecting to look in a particular place to see the process for every group, I would leave that as open ended and give students autonomy to figure out what platform works best for them. And then, it's a platform that they're already familiar with and can help one another with, I think instead of pushing them into a space that they're unfamiliar with.

- So, it's true that they can create their own groups in Zoom without us having any kind of involvement?

- Absolutely, absolutely, students have access to Zoom the exact same way that we all have access to Zoom. Yeah.

- Yeah, I wanted to ask and check my understanding of something, if you have students in person on Zoom and students outside of class on Zoom, it has to be on a separate Zoom link for each group, doesn't it? Or don't you have feedback issues if everyone's on the same Zoom link?

- Yeah, I think if you were to do people in the classroom, like Kelsey was talking about, you'd have to have people bring headphones as well to avoid that feedback loop, absolutely. If you have speakers all blasting the same audio and microphones picking up that audio, you're gonna really quickly have a frustrating experience of echoes bouncing all over the place. But if everyone has headsets, you can you can avoid that and kinda work around that challenge. There's a question in chat from Andrea, Andrea, sorry if I'm mispronouncing, about what strategies people have found to help manage group issues that might arise. I think it's a great question. Lots of what we talked about here today was kind of proactive, how can we avoid those group issues arising at all, but inevitably, it will arise. And my biggest recommendation there is just work with students as the adults that they are and try to treat those challenges in that fashion, and help them figure out the best way forward. But I think this is really trying to draw out what are other people doing? So, I'm gonna open that up to the floor and signal boost it, 'cause I think it's a great question. I'd love to hear what other people are doing too. There's certainly not one right or wrong answer for this. I also see that it's 11:31. So, if people are needing to go, I hate to tack this on at the very end. I'm happy to stick around and continue q&a if people have more questions that they'd like to discuss, if there's additional conversation we'd like to have. But if you need to step away, that's totally fine, 11:30. I wanna respect your time. Thank you all for coming, and we'll follow up shortly with a survey and some resources from this as well. Take care.

- [Yoanna] I have a quick question. I got lost a little bit with the groups. So, you're telling me that groups can create pages. But for that, I have to put the pages tab in my Canvas?

- So, you actually don't. The group set, you don't have any control over what shows up in that left hand navigation of the group.

- Oh, okay.

- It's an entirely different space outside of your course.

- And they do it themselves, they put that pages there?

- They can, yeah.

- So, they have their own navigation thing that they can... And I can see their pages?

- You can, yes. If you go into their group space, the pages won't show up in your course page listing. You'd have to go into their group space, and then look at the pages there.

- Okay, okay, now everything is clear, thank you.

- Well, related to this, I've been wondering how could I show students what they can do with the groups if I can only show them my instructor view, then I wanna be able to do a screen share like you were doing and show them okay, here's what it looks like when you go see your group and here's all the things you can add to your group page.

- Right.

- I can't see that when I'm in my Canvas.

- So, if you go to the group space as the instructor, it's almost exactly the same as what the students see if they're getting into the group space. So, the only pieces that you really wouldn't be able to demonstrate particularly well are getting to the group space initially, because you'd be accessing it through the group's tab. And in fact, I wasn't even doing that as a student for the demonstration that I was showing you either. I went to a previous group, it was completely unrelated.

- I think within the, Cathy, you can do, and I do it all the time with the students, is I create a video of what I want them to see, how to do the things. And Big Read or whatever, in that way, I post it there, the same way that we learn through videos all these tools, and I just show them a little bit the steps, and that's how I do it.

- Yeah. So, in terms of what you end up seeing. So, if I go into this group's homepage, this is what I see. And if I go into the group that I'm a student in, this is what I see. So, the only functional difference here is that when I'm the instructor, I can toggle between the different groups quickly and easily. Whereas, when you're a student, you're just in that one group. But in terms of what I'm able to edit and do in that space, it's exactly the same whether you're the teacher of the course or a student in the group. So, I think there shouldn't be too much of a disconnect in terms of what you're showing them versus what they're seeing.

- Yeah, well, I like her idea of making a video, 'cause then I could make, show here's where you access it, and then pause recording, and then just go to the navigation of here's what you'll see and they won't have to see that graphic that I make.

- [Steven] Yeah, absolutely.

- [Cathy] Good idea, Yoanna, thank you.

- Another question, when we were talking about what the students drop and they get out of the groups or whatever. And you guys were talking about in the beginning, wait for the first two weeks, bat at least with language at the end, when we have these final projects, and the students are just doing really bad, they just disappeared from the project. So, what will it be the suggestion there for those gray things that we were talking about?

- So, the suggestion around if you have someone who's leaving a group project in kind of the 11th hour, right.

- [Yoanna] At the end, at the end.

- Yeah. So, the concern then is what do you do with the rest of the group?

- In the grades, with the...

- [Steven] Right.

- The grade for the group.

- Right, so you're concerned that that person is dropping the ball and leaving the rest of the group with a bunch of pieces that haven't been connected, and the rest of the group is unable to pull that together?

- Well, I thought that you were talking about when you have grade groups, the group with one grade, that that affects the other students, or...

- It can, but you have that checkbox on assignments to assign grades individually as well. So, if you need to adjust an individual's grade, you can go in and check that box on the assignment settings to grade students individually. And then, you can adjust an individual student.

- That's where I start getting lost because I was listen something and trying to figure out other thing. So, what was the problem to have to wait to create groups in the first two weeks?

- So, I think the challenge there is because those first couple weeks is a time when students are pretty likely to drop and add courses still. So, if you have a lot of movement in terms of the enrollment of your course, it can be difficult to establish those communities early on.

- Do we know when that is for this semester? Is it later than normal, because of our like remote week or?

- That is a good question. Let me look on COVID-19 website and see what it says.

- I need a COVID-19 website, I need that appendix or something with a...

- It's a pretty .

- Or something.

- [Cathy] Yeah.

- Modified academic calendar, let's see. It does not...

- It looks like August 28th is the last day to drop. So, it kind of looks like that was now moved.

- Where did you find that?

- [Amy] On the academic calendar.

- [Yoanna] Wait a minute, we start on August 17, that cannot be August 20.

- 28th?

- [Amy] 28, yeah.

- And that's the end of the first in person week then?

- Yeah, so they've got two weeks this year instead of just one week.

- Okay, yeah.

- And that, the calendar you're looking at has been updated for the changes?

- Yeah.

- [Steven] Okay.

- That was an academic calendar, right? They already summed up all of that, okay.

- I had a question about if I wanna use Yellowdig as the way that the students are going to discuss things in their groups, but I also am maybe intrigued by them doing something with their group pages, is there a good way to bring those together or are they just gonna kinda live separately?

- I think those are likely gonna end up just living separately.

- [Cathy] Okay.

- Have you worked with groups in Yellowdig at this point, or no?

- [Cathy] No .

- Okay, you may wanna--

- Well, yeah, that was the other thing is I wanna do what you had said about that you can make private groups.

- Yeah.

- To kind of reduce the all of what's in there so it's less overwhelming.

- Yeah, you can definitely do that. But I'd take a look at what that group creation process in Yellowdig looks like first. And I don't think there's gonna be a way for you to really get that tied into what's happening elsewhere.

- I thought that I could create hashtags for the groups in Yellowdig. The idea of Yellowdig for me is that it grades itself. And that's just something that I need so badly.

- Same, same, yeah.

- So, I thought about creating hashtags for the different groups that I was gonna create. Because I like the idea of the discussion not to be that opening for everything. But sometimes, if I do create hashtags, that doesn't mean that I am stopping from seeing the other ideas, but at the same time, I want just check that group. My only concern is with that group.

- My only concern with that is that students would forget to put a hashtag in all their posts.

- [Yoanna] That's true.

- So, you could make it topics, and then set the topic to be required, right? That's the thing to do to address that.

- Right, they request you for a topic all the time.

- [Steven] Right.

- But then they would need, if I have other topics of just the topics that they're talking about, they need to put that topic as well as their group topic, but again, they have to remember to put both of those, right?

- Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can only require a topic. You can't have requirements on top of that. So, it is yeah, there's some logistical challenges around that for sure.

- Okay, I have to comment, or a comment and question, first comment is I love to tie the other groups in the forums or whatever, because for me, language, that force them to speak, that force them to use the language, and it will not, again, overwhelm me with the amount of things that they do. The other question that I have, and it just came to me this week, not this week, last week, this week is just starting, we are talking about these hybrid classes to kind of have half of the group here and online, and half of the group, but I was thinking are we're assuming that the students are gonna have all the free time in the world to say, oh, this time I'm gonna join on Zoom and this time I'm gonna join in person, oh, now I have to run to the corner of the building where nobody is present so I can join in Zoom to my class. Has anybody talked to you guys about that? I know that you are not part of that decide, but has anybody?

- Yeah, I can say at least in the Journalism Department, that's something that they're talking about pretty actively, if you've got face to face course, immediately followed by a Zoom course, where are you supposed to be for that? And they're talking about maybe setting aside some areas of the building where students can do that. So, as long as they have headphones, they've got some space where they can make that happen. So, I don't know if other buildings and departments are talking about that as well.

- That's a really good point though. I hadn't really thought about that, but you're right. The students, we need to be able to give the students some guidance on how to do that. College is doing.

- So many things, I don't think it needs to be college wise, I think should be University wise that the university can create that book about what we are gonna be doing. And again, it has to be in alphabetical order so we can find out, because I was just thinking about that now that I've seen my classes and my numbers are increasing, I'm getting one class on top and the other class is getting to top, and et cetera, et cetera. So, I missed nothing that I have kind of figured out how am I gonna do the hybrid thing, that came to my mind. I cannot command them in their schedule, how to do things. I think that is great, there has to be University wise.

- I think that's a piece of that. I think that making sure we're thinking through what kind of asynchronous options are available for that is also another important piece of it, not just how can we make sure that everyone who, everyone possible can attend synchronously, but also what if you just really can't make it, if you have an in person course and you don't have a space to join synchronously? And you have to go back home before you can join the synchronous course, you need to make sure that some asynchronous options are available and part of that includes recording the synchronous session, part of that includes discussion boards, part of that includes.

- Yeah, when you were talking, sharing that talk about having them been in so many classes, while we have to think about they have to be six feet away. And maybe, actually, I even thought that maybe they are synchronous person and in class person, having that discussion, because I was keeping the space safe. But I don't know, I don't know what... Thank you, I just had that, those where my two questions. Thank you very much guys. That's why I'm joining all this, because it's just a lot of ideas come to the mind and new ways to create things, and thank you.

- Yeah, happy to. I know it's not always, there's not a space for it, and that's always challenging. I'm sure it raises as many new questions and challenges as it helps solve.

- But ideas. I just need a lot of ideas that I might not have down.

- It's good.

- In my notebook. Okay, thank you guys, have a nice one.

- [Steven] You bet, thank you, Yoanna.

- I had a question about the forming of the groups. And so, I get the waiting until the enrollment moves around. However, I also want to start them off in that remote week of just hey, get to know each other, see what, how to use Yellowdig, practice using it by introducing yourself, I think that's a really good task for them to do during that remote week. But and I don't plan to do a formal group project, I plan to use group work more informally, and I haven't fully decided. I think, potentially the group stuff will just live asynchronously. And then, any of my synchronous stuff would just maybe just be the random breakout rooms, 'cause the preassigning just stresses me out, I think. I don't know.

- Me too .

- I know, I might try to figure that out. Anyway, so I guess I'm just wondering about how to reconcile those two goals. And then also, if I want to assign groups based on certain criteria, but I won't know those criteria until they can start the course and give me that information, I guess what is your advice for that?

- You won't know the criteria that.

- I couldn't give them a survey. I guess I could send them a survey before the course starts, but then they might not all fill it out, so...

- I think that that first week is a great opportunity to open up community across the entire course, and say, introduce yourself, not just to your group, but to the entire course. And then, you can kinda dig in and read those introductions for your group with a little bit more thoughtfulness.

- I guess I just wanted to use the the private Yellowdig, 'cause I just really wanna reduce, I'm gonna have over 200 students. And so, I don't know, when I was inside and people were introducing themselves, I read a couple of them and I was like, I can't, I can't read all of these.

- Yeah.

- It was just way too much, so I guess I would just really, ideally like to just start them off from here's your little mini community within the large community, introduce yourself, but maybe I just have to randomly assign them.

- With the Yellowdig integration, you do need to have them get into the discussion board once before you can form groups anyways, so it's unfortunately not going to be something where you can just say like, here are the groups, because the Yellowdig account doesn't get activated for each student until they access it the first time.

- [Cathy] Interesting, okay.

- So, it's not... Yeah, not to add another wrinkle, but...

- Well no, that's good to know. And I just haven't spent time exploring that, so I need to know.

- And I would say also, it sounds like really what you're using these groups for is more informal discussion, not large field projects, in which case, it's less of an issue if you set up those groups ahead of time and end up having to move folks around. So, in that case, you probably don't need to wait for the full two weeks in order to do that. That was more, if this is a semester long project, high stakes at the end, you wanna make sure that the people you're putting in these groups are gonna stick around, but in your case, do it whenever you want. As Steven said, in Yellowdig, wait until after they've posted, but other than that.

- Well, I just think with it, Cathy is the survey, we did kind of create a survey that is like worth one point. And it is in Canvas, and they will go, and one of the things that you were talking about introductions and what we did is we create a set of questions. So, it could be just limited to that information. And then, the last question was tell me something about you or whatever you wanna tell me. So they could explain. But the most important information was in those questions.

- Yeah, I've done a pre semester survey, I did that in the spring. Just for them telling me about themselves. But I was interested in the idea of them meeting each other since they just are gonna have less opportunity for that in this setting.

- Yeah, and given that it's more informal in nature anyways, I'm not sure that the significance of that is gonna be as strong as it would be if there was a formal project where there was accountability between members of that group, right? It's nice to have that community and people.

- Yeah, I guess I just wanted to have them be mixed groups in terms of their background in biology, like you talked about the stronger students, or the I guess more well prepared students, sort of evenly distributed was kind of the main thing that I wanted to group them with, 'cause some of those people, well group things that we'll ask them to discuss will be the biology content. And so, having group members that are gonna be more knowledgeable kinda spread around.

- Yeah, I think giving that survey out in the first week is probably gonna be the most important thing, there is just making sure that you can collect that data early so that you can make those adjustments and form groups with whatever criteria you wanna incorporate into that early on. I'm not sure that that really tells you anything you didn't already know, but...

- No, but it just helps to think it through. And sometimes these things are just like dedicated time to think about these things, our other time gets eaten up by other things.

- You bet, no happy to chat. I just don't wanna be just regurgitating the thing you said back at you. But no, I think it's a good, a good approach. I think you're on the right path for sure. All right, well, it's 11:53, it's almost noon.

- Yeah.

- I think I'm gonna go ahead and, what's that?

- [Cathy] I said thanks for sticking around.

- Yeah, happy to, no problem, take care, see ya.

- Bye.