Facilitating group work skills in online environment: experiences from developing a course assignment

Online environments have become a major study environment for universities in the past years. This has put teachers in a new challenging position where they need to teach skills such as groupwork and collaboration in new types of virtual working environments. As the working environment has become increasingly virtual, the ability to communicate and work together also in virtual environments has become more important. This paper presents experiences from developing a groupwork initiation assignment to facilitate online groupwork skills and neighbourness competencies of university students. The findings indicate that although the assignment was experienced positively by many students, care needs to be taken on how the assignment is instructed and motivated, to promote the development of self-reflection and groupwork skills.