The Skill Students Resist, and Employers Expect

I have a confession. When I was earning my M.S.Ed. online, I dreaded seeing “group project” on a syllabus. I juggled coursework with a full-time job, logged in at odd hours, and did most of the work on every collaborative assignment. My standards were higher, my contributions more substantial, my late nights longer. I carried the team.

Here’s the awkward part: so did everyone else.

Researchers have been studying this phenomenon since 1979, when psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly found that group members consistently overestimate their own contributions (Ross & Sicoly, 1979). When you ask everyone on a team to estimate their percentage of the work, the numbers don’t add up to 100%; they add up to 114% on six-person teams. In studies of scientific coauthors, that number balloons to 167%. The bigger the team, the worse it gets: eight-person groups claim a collective 140% of the credit (Schroeder et al., 2016).

So if you or your students have ever finished a group project thinking I’m the only one who pulled my weight, congratulations. You’re not a uniquely burdened hero. You’re experiencing a well-documented cognitive bias known as egocentric overclaiming. And so is every other person on the team.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of student complaints about group work, this bias is a big part of why. Each student genuinely remembers their own effort more vividly than anyone else’s. The frustration is real, even when the workload was more balanced than it felt.

Why Collaboration Belongs in Online Course Design

That frustration is one reason faculty hesitate to assign collaborative work, and one reason students dread it. When the experience feels unfair (even when it isn’t), it’s hard to see the value. And yet, employers keep saying collaboration is exactly what they need. NACE consistently ranks teamwork among the top competencies employers seek (NACE Job Outlook, 2025). And with the rise of remote and hybrid work, the ability to collaborate asynchronously with a distributed team isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the job.

Here’s what I find most compelling, and what I didn’t appreciate until years after finishing my own degree: the asynchronous collaboration I did as an online student may have been closer to real workplace collaboration than any in-person group project. Navigating shared documents, negotiating timelines with classmates in different time zones, and giving written feedback to peers I rarely interact with face-to-face, I was rehearsing exactly the skills I now use every day in a distributed professional team. I just didn’t know it at the time.

And the data supports this. Research published in the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks found that online programs emphasizing student engagement and collaborative practices achieved completion rates of 85% or higher, meeting or exceeding those of their face-to-face counterparts. Faculty and instructional designers are paying attention, and so are employers. The question, then, isn’t whether to include collaboration in online courses. It’s about designing it so students experience it as preparation rather than punishment.

Making It Work: Practical Strategies for Course Design

None of this means we should assign a group project and hope for the best. When collaboration is poorly designed with vague instructions, uneven accountability, and misaligned outcomes, student frustration is justified. Here are approaches that work across disciplines:

Start with community, not content. Introductory discussions can feel formulaic, “share your name, major, and a fun fact”, but they don’t have to be. When students share their backgrounds, goals, and even their anxieties about the course in week one, it lays the groundwork for everything collaborative that follows. The shift is subtle but real: from “strangers assigned to a group” to “people who know something about each other.”

Be intentional about team formation. Random group assignment is easy, but a little structure goes a long way. Consider using surveys to match students by schedule availability, working style, or shared interests. Some institutions use dedicated tools , at OSU, for example, Ecampus offers a group finder tool , while others have students use AI to synthesize individual preferences into a working team charter. The goal is the same regardless of approach: help students start from common ground rather than cold introductions.

Make contributions visible. Remember that overclaiming bias? One of the best ways to counteract it is to build in structured peer evaluation of team contributions, not a review of each other’s papers, but an honest assessment of how each member showed up for the group. When teammates rate each other on dimensions like participation, communication, and follow-through, it creates accountability and gives instructors insight they wouldn’t otherwise have. At OSU, Ecampus has developed a custom tool for this purpose. CATME is a widely used option, and even a well-designed Google Form with clear criteria can do the job. However you implement it, the point is to give students a structured way to reflect on, and be accountable for, their collaboration.

Design for real-world parallels. In the sciences, interdisciplinary teams can tackle complex problems that mirror real-world research collaborations by designing solutions, analyzing data, and presenting findings as a group. In business courses, teams can build a business plan or marketing strategy together, or work through a case competition where they analyze a real scenario and present recommendations. In the humanities, students can collaborate on oral history projects or produce a podcast episode together, work that requires negotiation, shared decision-making, and a tangible product. The key is making the collaboration itself part of the learning outcome, not just a delivery mechanism.

A Better Way to Think About It

The next time a student groans about a group project or a colleague pushes back on interaction requirements, it might help to share the research on overclaiming. Not to dismiss their frustration, but to reframe it: the discomfort of collaboration isn’t a design flaw. It’s the learning happening.

And if they still insist they did most of the work? Well. So did everyone else.

References

Herz, N., Dan, O., Censor, N., & Bar-Haim, Y. (2020). Authors overestimate their contribution to scientific work, demonstrating a strong bias. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(12), 6282–6285.
Moore, J. C., & Fetzner, M. J. (2009). The road to retention: A closer look at institutions that achieve high course completion rates. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 13(3), 3–22.
National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2025). Job outlook 2025. https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/
Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 322–336.
Schroeder, J., Caruso, E. M., & Epley, N. (2016). Many hands make overlooked work: Over-claiming of responsibility increases with group size. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 22(2), 238–246. See also: Why teams overinflate their contributions. Chicago Booth Review. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-teams-overinflate-their-contributions

By Susan Fein, Instructional Designer, susan.fein@oregonstate.edu

In my role as an instructional designer, the faculty I work with are often looking for ways to increase student engagement and add a “wow” factor to their online course. One way to do that is to add or increase active learning practices.

Active learning requires students to do something and think about what they are doing, rather than simply listening, as with a passive-learning lecture (Bonwell & Eison, 1991). Active learning brings positive and lasting outcomes to students, including better retention and grasp of concepts, and is particularly evident when students work together to develop solutions (Chickering & Gamson, 1987).

Tackling Discussions

In 2019, I worked with an instructor developing a biochemistry/biophysics course for Ecampus. The instructor loved the peer-to-peer interaction intended for discussions, but was discouraged by the often lackluster exchange commonly demonstrated in the posts. She wanted to liven up these conversations, not only to increase the strength of the community but also to have an impact on the value of the learning that took place.

Enter knowledge boards! With a simple but creative retooling of the predictable initial-post-and-two-replies format, the instructor found a way to reimagine the often mundane discussion board and transform it into a lively and highly engaging conversation and exchange of knowledge.

How did she do this? Rather than compel all students to respond to a narrow or artificially-constructed prompt, the instructor instead posted several relevant topics or short questions extracted from the concepts presented during that week’s lectures and readings. Topics might be a single word or a short phrase, and the questions were tightly focused and direct.

Choice and Agency

From this list of 5 to 10 conversation starters that give breadth to the topics, the students can choose which they want to respond to, often selecting what’s of greatest interest to them. These posts could be anything related to the topic or question, so students are free to approach from any perspective or direction.

The instructor found that the students more freely contributed ideas, insights, understandings, questions, confusion, and commentary. They were encouraged to ask questions of each other to delve into significant points. Students could engage in as many conversations as desired, at their discretion. As a result, they tended to be more actively involved, not only with the content and concepts from that week’s materials, but also with each other, producing a strong community of inquiry.

This simple change transformed the tired and (dare I say it?) potentially boring weekly discussion into a meaningful opportunity for a lively and valuable knowledge exchange. The instructor explained that students also report that this knowledge board becomes a study guide, summarizing multiple approaches and insightful content they use for studying, so many revisit the posts even after that week is over as a way to review.

But Wait…There’s More!

The instructor didn’t stop at discussions in her pursuit of increased engagement and active learning. Her next “trick” was to evaluate how the assessments, especially homework problems, were presented.

A typical format in many Ecampus courses is to have students complete homework assignments individually, and these are generally graded on the correctness of the answers. But once again, this instructor redesigned a conventional activity by applying principles of active learning and collaborative pedagogy to improve learning outcomes.

In the new version, students first answer and submit solutions to the homework individually, and this initial phase is graded on proper application of concepts, rather than on the correctness of the answer. Next, students work together in small groups of 3 or 4 to discuss the same set of problems and, as a group, arrive at consensus of the correct answers.

The active learning “magic” occurs during this critical second phase. If one student is confident about an answer, they present evidence from the lectures and readings to persuade their peers. And when a student is not certain that they correctly grasped the concepts, they discuss the problem and relevant principles, learning from each other through this review, hearing different perspectives and interpretations of the materials. It is through these vital peer-to-peer interactions that the active learning takes place.

As the last phase of the activity, the group submits their answers, which are graded for correctness.

This reshaping of a classic homework activity results in deeper levels of understanding and stronger knowledge retention (Weimer, 2012). And there’s an added benefit for the instructor, too. Since there are fewer papers to grade, formatting homework as a group submission means extra time to offer more and better feedback than would be feasible when grading each student individually. A win-win bonus!

Benefits of Active Learning

These are just two simple but ingenious ways to reformat classic forms of interaction and assessment.

Do you have an idea of how you can alter an activity in your course to make it more interesting and engaging? If you sense that your online course could use a boost, consider incorporating more active learning principles to add the extra oomph that could transform your teaching content from mundane to magical!

So let’s close this post in true active learning style and take a moment to reflect. What kinds of active learning practices have you tried in your course? How did those go? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences, so please share in comments.

References

Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active Learning; Creating Excitement in the Classroom (Vol. Education Report No. 1). Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.

Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987, March). Seven Principles for Good Practice. AAHE Bulletin 39, 3-7.

Weimer, M. (2012, March 27). Five Key Principles of Active Learning. Retrieved from Faculty Focus: https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/five-key-principles-of-active-learning/

I am an avid gamer. For some time, I have been thinking about how engaging games are and whether this quality can be leveraged for other purposes; like instruction. Put more simply … What is it about games that makes them so engaging? Is there something about this that we can use as educators? Granted, these are not new questions.

Dr. Meghan Naxer recently posted a primer on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), Self-Determination Theory and Online Education: A Primer. I believe SDT does an excellent job describing much of what makes games so motivating and engaging. Indeed, games provide an excellent model of SDT and can inform us on how the three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) might be met in learning environments. I hope to build on some of the concepts introduced in Meghan’s post.

This is the first in a series of posts on games as a model for SDT. In part 1, I look at the convergence of Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness in gaming and online learning in relation to building community and intrinsic motivation.

Autonomy: Open Worlds

Games are becoming increasingly complex, particularly in the arena of Open World games where players are allowed to choose their own paths (autonomy). Entire worlds, even universes, exist for you to immerse yourself in, each with their own history and internal logic. You are often thrown into a new world with few instructions.

For example, in the Open World game No Man’s Sky, millions of stars and planets are procedurally generated just for you, unique to your specific game. When this game begins, you appear on an alien planet next to a broken space ship. Your space suit is running out of oxygen. No instructions, just urgent messages from your onboard computer on toxicity and your decreasing oxygen levels.

The complexity of modern open world games is more than can be reasonably covered in a tutorial. Besides, a significant part of what makes the game engaging is the autonomous exploration and discovery. You decide how you will play the game, in what order you will do things and at what pace. Being told how to play the game is far less interesting.

Here is the internal logic of No Man’s Sky:

You’re in an alien environment.
It seems like you are alone.
There are problems to solve.
There is no instruction manual.
You must explore to solve these problems.

Think about that in comparison to your online students when they first enter your course. Online students do have instructions to help them get started. However, at first glance, it can seem like they are thrown in the deep end to figure things out for themselves. In a situation where intrinsic motivation is less clear, this can lead to frustration. That does not have to be the case. For gamers, there is one more bullet-point.

When you get stuck, you can turn to an online community.

If you were to talk to a gamer and describe your experience about how many times you ‘died’ trying to figure a game out, a common reaction would be something like, “Why would you do that? You know there’s a wiki, right?” Playing an online game today is not a solo venture, even if it is a solo game.

Relatedness: Gaming Communities

Online communities spring up around successful games to support players. A majority of large games have an accompanying Wiki, many of which are curated and updated by players. Various online communities exist to discuss specific games in forums and social media. Players discuss technical issues, the internal logic of a game, the lore and history of the game’s world, where to focus their efforts when starting, or the best order to do certain tasks for best success.

The point here is that given the resources, an intrinsically motivated group of people will figure out ways to help each other succeed. This speaks to Relatedness. In an environment where players are given maximum autonomy, they turn toward their community to support that autonomy and gain competence in that environment. Further, when given an opportunity to contribute to supportive communities, to share their competence, players feel valued as members of that community. So, can we create something like this environment in an online course?

Intrinsic Motivation: Sharing Competence

The challenge in my above summary is intrinsic motivation. There is something of an inherent motivation to play a game and get better at it. Though it can be less clear, online students also have intrinsic motivation beyond just ‘passing the course’. Community building can be a way to help students to discover and support these motivations.

Following the gaming example from above,

“Players discuss technical issues … where to focus their efforts when starting, or the best order to do certain tasks for best success.”

This is a good place to start building community. Simply encourage your students to share their success strategies in your course.

Formalize this by setting up a forum-style environment where students share their experiences, the process they used to solve a problem, the biggest stumbling block this week, or simply to ask each other for help. Much of this could also be accomplished through existing discussions or peer reviews by simply adjusting or adding language for students to draw from their own success strategies, “What did you discover this week that would benefit another student?”

Group work is another tool that can be used for helping students discover intrinsic motivation and build community. Challenge students to work together to apply this week’s content to something in their own lives, a subject of their choice. Trust them to find the problem that needs solving. This is similar to participation in a gaming community – sharing and building competence. But in this case, you are allowing students to build the narrative.

By giving students some autonomy in deciding the end product of their work, you are creating an opportunity for them to discover what drives them.

With all of these examples, it is perfectly reasonable to set the ‘internal logic’ of the environment; subject matter to be discussed, the completion goals, length of the project, rubrics for assessment purposes. The idea is to allow students more autonomy in determining how to get to these goals. All that you are really changing, compared to a typical assignment, is control of the narrative.

And that is a nice segue to the topic of my upcoming post, Part 2, Games as a Model for Motivation and Engagement – Narrative and World-Building

With the migration to Canvas comes many new features and methods for facilitating your course. stock-photo-female-tourist-holding-a-map-890139 The Canvas Guides provide a lot of information, but you may be wondering, where do I even start? Here at Ecampus, we’ve put together a few guides to help you become familiar with some of the tools in Canvas.

First, if you’re wondering, “I did this in Blackboard, but I can’t find it in Canvas; how do I…?”, we’ve created a few design options for that. These design options explore how to adapt features that you’ve used in Blackboard to the new Canvas environment.

We’ve also created some more in depth quick references that help explain how to use some of the most popular Canvas features.

The Quick Reference guides and other helpful Canvas-specific information can be found on our Canvas Faculty Resources page. We also have a list of resources for teaching an online course on our Teaching Resources page where you can find our favorite presentation, web-conferencing, and other tools.

Are there other features you’ve discovered or some you’d like to know more about? Leave your feedback in the comments!

Ecampus Course Development and Training

Providing inspiration for your online class

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Let’s Get Active: Adding Active Learning in Your Online Course