Facilitating online student group work assignments

Abstract

This paper reports a case study on the facilitations of online student group work assignment within on-campus and distance education. There is prior research that explores the use of technology for distance education. However, research that explores how to facilitate distance education group work assignment through the use of technology is limited. Being different from on-campus students, distance education students work in online group assignments with detrimental constraints of disparate locations and time differences. This research adopts a qualitative case study method. It explored distance education student group work performance in a subject. In particular, it investigated the role of a teacher in facilitating distance education students in completing their group assignments in an information technology course. The findings indicate that the facilitation could be more challenging in distance education than on-campus student education. The paper proposes various ways to facilitate online group work to enable distance education group work assignment success.