• The study activity can take place in existing PBL groupings or groups that are formed as you go. This depends on how closely related the task is to the semester project.
• Start out by giving a small presentation where you specify the nature of the task and what the end result should be.
• Furthermore, it should be made clear to the students whether they will receive feedback from their groupwork and if so, if this will be peer-feedback or feedback from you, the educator.
• We recommend that the subject and goal of the task is related to the student's semester project or other/future subjects related to their current course of study.

• Study activities where group work is involved requires that you make time for it in face-to-face teachings, so that the students can discuss it among themselves. By doing this,  it is required of you, the educator, that you have made a video or podcast of academic nature describing the task before the class and have provided it to your students, or that your in class presentation is held to the bare minimum, so your students still have time to discuss and work together
• To ensure that the students are engaged in the group work, the goal and content of the task should have clear relevance for the students education
• You can provide sub-tasks or sub-questions that can help the students reflect on the task and enable their discussion to flow more freely.
• Support the students' discussions by ensuring that they are dependent on one another and by ensuring that the subject is considered relevant and pertinent. The product of their discussions is hereby secondary to the learning process but crucial to facilitating it.
• The requirements of the end product may be formulated so the students feel that it is useful to them after the completion of the task – both with and without the provision of feedback.
• A challenge that may occur when using this sort of study activity is that the educator does not know what has been discussed in the individual groups.
• Study activities in groupwork are primarily efficient when a class size does not exceed 60 students.

• Students compare, in groups, how they have solved the tasks given in preparation for the class, with the goal that they can identify elements that they struggled with and may require explanation or elaboration
• Students discuss in groups dilemmas and dichotomies that excist in the prepartion tasks for the day
• Role provision: each student in the group is provided with a task in connection to working with a text and thereafter they work in cooperation in solving their individual task in groups.
• Matrix groups: the groups work with various sub elements of the task and following this, they are divided into new groups where they work with all the elements of the task.
• The students create a product in groups, this could be a sketch, an audio recording, videorecording that represents the nature of what the students have been discussing or working with during the group work process. The product, by the end of the process, be presented and explained to the other students and saved in Moodle for future use. The groups can, subsequently, work with various subjects and share the products afterward.

Many project groups work online with their projects, but as a rule try to meet up physically on campus or someplace else. As an educator you can benefit from the Learning Technologies the students already know. At AAU everybody has access to the office 365 package. Office 365 is a collection of new and old apps, where the ones you might be most familiar with are apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It is now possible to work in these apps in real time, so the project group is always oriented about who has made what correction to the project, what other members of the group are currently working on and so on. During your teaching it is now possible to provide the students with tasks they can solve together without being together physically, when using Office 365. As an educator you can create a joint document that you can link to in Moodle or teams and all the students can access this document and edit it, without the hassle of sending the document back and forth.  

You will thereby be able to follow along in the process of the students and share corrections with them. The students have the same opportunity when they access the document from their computer or tablet. Hereby files are no longer static but dynamic and provide the students with the opportunity to contribute and construct their knowledge for the task you provide in your teachings.

In CDUL we work with finding new ways to use Learning Technologies to facilitate PBL.

Do you wish to innovate your teaching and digital study activities that involves group work? Or do you wish for your teaching to contain more group work? Then we at CDUL are ready with help and guidance in this regard. You can also read more about Office 365, Moodle and the other Learning Technologies that AAU provides at our website here.