Collaboration is an important part of the learning process.  Positive group experiences have been shown to increase student engagement, retention, and overall academic success (Palloff & Pratt, 2005).  By working together with their peers, students can exercise a host of foundational skills that can be applied to the real world and reinforce skills relevant to their coursework (Flaherty, 2022).   In a collaborative learning environment, knowledge is exchanged among students as they search for information, discuss, and share options. 

Although working in groups is beneficial, it can be difficult to keep track of everything happening within the team.  Having a shared space to communicate, collect resources, share knowledge and opinions, and work together to produce a final product or presentation is key.  Canvas Groups offers a great solution for this.  

Canvas Groups are collaborative work spaces, essentially a mini-site within your Canvas course,  where students can work together on projects and assignments.  Students can be placed into groups manually or randomly distribute students across any number of groups.  Each Canvas Group will have full access to many of the same tools found in Canvas course sites, including Announcements, Collaborations, Discussions, Files, and Pages.
 

Setting Up Canvas Group Workspaces 

Canvas Groups provides a variety of options for setting up your student groups, allowing you to choose what works best for your course, students, and particular assignment.  The first option is to manually create groups and assign students to them yourself.  This works great if you have a smaller class size and/or would like to be strategic in creating groups.  The second option is to have Canvas automatically create groups and distribute students evenly among those groups.  Finally, the third option is to create a specific number of groups and then allow students to self select their groups.  Canvas Groups also allows you to set a group leader for each group.  Having roles within a group provides structure and distributes responsibility among group members.  This helps to ensure all students are taking an active role within the team. 
 

Group Communication

Communication is very often a trouble spot for groups.  Students commonly complain they struggle to communicate with one another when working on group projects.  Canvas Groups provides a simple, streamlined way for students to communicate with members of their group.  Within their Canvas Group workspace, students can send out Announcements to the entire group and create discussion boards. They can also message individual members of the group, if needed.  Instructors can also send messages to specific groups and check-in on each group’s progress by accessing the group’s workspace.  In addition, students can also create Pages, share Files, and create collaborative Google documents through Collaborations, making it easier for them to collaborate on tasks.
 

Creating Group Assignments and Discussions

You can create both Canvas Assignments and Discussions using the groups you create in your course. If you create a group Canvas Assignment, students can work together on the assignment and then submit it as a group. Only one student has to submit the assignment on behalf of the group. When grading a group assignment, you can assign a grade and provide feedback comments to the entire group in Speedgrader. You also have the option to assign grades to each student individually. With this option, you can enter a grade for each individual member of the group, and you can choose to send feedback comments to the individual student or the whole group. This is a good option if you plan to adjust students’ grades to reflect their individual contributions to the assignment. For example, you can create a peer evaluation for students to provide feedback on their group members’ contributions and use this feedback when grading. 

You can also set up group discussions in Canvas. When you create a group Canvas Discussion, Canvas will create a copy of the discussion board prompt so that students interact with their smaller groups instead of the entire class. This is a great feature if you have a larger class since discussions with a lot of students can become overwhelming, which leads to students all replying to the same one or two posts. Creating smaller group discussions can be less overwhelming for students as they have fewer posts to read and respond to. Students will only be able to see their group’s discussion, so it can be helpful to send out an announcement to the class after the due date to share common themes or interesting points you noticed across all discussion groups. 

Canvas Groups makes it simple to create opportunities for collaboration that will foster student engagement with your course material. If you are interested in exploring Canvas Groups further, request a consultation with the LSA Learning and Teaching Consultants.  

References:

Flaherty, H. B. (2022). Using collaborative group learning principles to foster community in online classrooms. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 42(1), 31-44. https://doi.org/10.1080/08841233.2021.2013390
 

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2005). Collaborating online: Learning together in community. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.