Webinar
Rethinking groupwork: A five-year journey of practice-based learning and redesign
Southern Cross University
August CTL Workshop (28/08/2025)
28/08/2025
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Abstract
Groupwork is often positioned as a pedagogical strategy for developing collaboration and problem-solving skills, yet its design and facilitation are frequently met with frustration and dissatisfaction by staff and students alike. This reflective practice project shares insights from five years of iterative redesign in CRTV1002 - Create: Innovate: Change - a core first-year unit spanning several degrees at Southern Cross University. The unit challenges students to work in teams on real-world, design-led problems, yet early implementations revealed persistent issues: inequitable workload, group conflict, disengagement, and limited skill development. Drawing on SoLT literature and structured experimentation with group formation, assessment timing, peer evaluation, and digital tools, this project identifies strategies that can lead to improved outcomes. Key shifts include moving to allocated groups, embedding early team-building, scaffolding collaboration skills, and ensuring authentic, high-relevance tasks. The findings argue for embedding collaboration capability across the curriculum, with deliberate scaffolding, assessment structures that value the process not just the product and institutional support for the invisible labour of group facilitation.
Details
- Title
- Rethinking groupwork: A five-year journey of practice-based learning and redesign
- Creators
- Owen Hogan - Southern Cross University
- Event
- August CTL Workshop (28/08/2025)
- Publisher
- Southern Cross University
- Identifiers
- 991013314518402368
- Academic Unit
- Centre for Teaching and Learning; Management; Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Webinar
- Local Fields
- Evidence Based Practice - SoLT