This article examines third year social work students' perceptions of the value of a mandatory, self-help online support group for teaching group work skills. Students overwhelmingly identified the ...group's worth as lying in the mutual support received. They also felt that participating in a live group fostered the translation of group work theory and skills into a concrete environment. Experiential group work is the foundation of group work pedagogy in face-to-face classroom settings. This research suggests that this experience can be meaningfully replicated in a virtual context. Other course activities such as journaling and formal reflection and assessment of group process and dynamics support the integration of group work knowledge and skills promoted through the group experience. It is thus a teaching strategy that instructors of online group work courses might incorporate in the course curriculum.
Data-driven platforms with rich data and learning analytics applications provide immense opportunities to support collaborative learning such as algorithmic group formation systems based on learning ...logs. However, teachers can still get overwhelmed since they have to manually set the parameters to create groups and it takes time to understand the meaning of each indicator. Therefore, it is imperative to explore predictive indicators for algorithmic group formation to release teachers from the dilemma with explainable group formation indicators and recommended settings based on group work purposes. Employing learning logs of group work from a reading-based university course, this study examines how learner indicators from different dimensions before the group work connect to the subsequent group work processes and consequences attributes through correlation analysis. Results find that the reading engagement and previous peer ratings can reveal individual achievement of the group work, and a homogeneous grouping strategy based on reading annotations and previous group work experience can predict desirable group performance for this learning context. In addition, it also proposes the potential of automatic group formation with recommended parameter settings that leverage the results of predictive indicators.
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