Using Zoom for Facilitating Small Group Activities

Small group activities are a key part of face-to-face learning, but they are also particularly useful in virtual classroom learning environments. Many active learning activities like think-pair-share and collaborative document annotation work well in Zoom using a feature called breakout rooms.  

Breakout Rooms Overview 

The Breakout Rooms button on the Zoom controls toolbar
The Breakout Rooms button in the Zoom meeting toolbar. If you don’t see this button, click the three dots (…) on the right side of the toolbar and then select “Breakout Rooms” from the options.

Breakout rooms are used to split Zoom participants into smaller groups and place them in separate sessions where they can only hear and see their fellow group members until they return to the main room. During this time you could have students discuss a question, brainstorm solutions to a problem, or read an article with their small group. As the host, you can join and leave any of the breakout rooms as you please, which may be useful for checking how students are doing or clearing up any questions the group may have. 

Like any small group activity, breakout rooms work best when they have a clear purpose. Before you consider using breakout rooms in your virtual class sessions, consider the intention of the activity. Provide your students with clear instructions on what they are supposed to do during their breakout group time. It might be helpful to give students a concrete goal for their discussions as well. For example, you could have the groups nominate a notetaker to jot down important points from their conversation and then verbally summarize their group’s discussion when they return to the main room with the entire class.  

Creating Breakout Rooms 

Once you have decided on how you want to conduct your group activity, you can use that information to inform what settings you’d like to use for breakout rooms. First, you will want to learn about the basics of creating and managing Zoom breakout rooms. You have three main options for assigning students to breakout rooms:  

  • You can manually assign students to breakout rooms. 
  • You can automatically (randomly) assign students to breakout rooms based on the number of rooms you want (Zoom will show you how many participants per room in the bottom left corner of the pop-up window). 
  • You can let students choose which breakout room they want to join.  
"Create Breakout Rooms" pop-up menu
The pop-up window you see after clicking on the “Breakout Rooms” button, along with the three options for assigning participants.

Once you have selected which method you will use to assign students to their breakout rooms, you can click the blue “Create” button in the bottom-right corner of the pop-up window. This will set up your breakout rooms, but it will not start them yet. 

If you are using Zoom’s default settings for breakout rooms, you can click “Open All Rooms” to start the breakout rooms. Once you are ready for your students to return to the main room, simply click the red “Close All Rooms” button.  

Breakout Room Options and Features 

The breakout rooms "Options" pop-up menu
Clicking on the word “Options” in the breakout room menu will provide you more settings to customize your breakout rooms.

Zoom has a variety of features and options for breakout rooms. In this guide, we will include a few that are particularly useful for facilitating group activities. You can adjust breakout room settings before you open the rooms or even while the rooms are open.  

To open the breakout room options, click the word “Options” (or the gear icon on Mac) in the bottom-left corner of the breakout rooms menu. The first option, “Allow participants to choose room” will let students move between rooms, despite their original room assignment. The second setting, “allow participants to return to the main session at any time”, allows students to rejoin the main room where you, the host, will be unless you are visiting a breakout room. This could be useful if students need to “pop in” and ask you a question. If the third box is unchecked, students will be prompted to move to their assigned room once you open breakout rooms. If you would like students to be moved to breakout rooms automatically, you can check the third box. 

"Broadcast Message to All" pop-up text box
You can send all breakout rooms a message in chat with the “Broadcast Message to All” button.

Once your breakout rooms are open, it may be useful to provide your students with additional reminders or instructions. You can use the “Broadcast Message to All” button at the bottom of the breakout room menu to send a message to all groups, such as a warning on how much time they have left to discuss.  

You can also set a countdown timer from the breakout room settings. By default, when you close breakout rooms participants will see a 60-second countdown in which they will be prompted to move back to the main room. At the end of the minute, any remaining participants will be moved back to the main room automatically. You can adjust or eliminate this countdown from the breakout room settings as well. 

If you plan on using breakout rooms multiple times throughout a session, you can re-open the rooms at any time by clicking on the “Breakout Rooms” button in the toolbar and then the “Open All Rooms” button. This will put students back in the same breakout groups as before. If you wish to create new breakout groups (either of a different size or just to have students work with new peers), click the button that says “Recreate” instead. This will let you set the parameters for a new set of breakout rooms. 

Questions? 

For most technical questions, please contact Zoom support or the UWGB Help Desk. If your questions pertain to the Zoom Canvas integration, your best point of contact is dle@uwgb.edu. Lastly, if you have general questions about how you can use Zoom to support your teaching, we always welcome you to email the CATL inbox (catl@uwgb.edu) or schedule a consultation with a CATL member. The best way to become familiar with breakout rooms is to practice, so grab a few fellow instructors and give it a go, or set up a consultation with CATL where we can act as your pretend students. 

Collaborative Learning Assignments

A lot of students shudder at the thought of group assignments, and with good reason. A poorly-designed group assignment can be painful for the students involved and for the instructor. That being said, well-designed and properly scaffolded group activities have numerous positive effects on student learning. In a quality collaborative learning activity, students develop a deeper student understanding of course content as they learn from and teach their peers. Additionally, these activities can foster a sense of community between students and make academic dishonesty much less likely, as the group setting adds a built-in network of accountability. In terms of academic rigor, group assignments don’t necessarily need to be easier than individual exercises, but students shouldn’t be unequally yoked when they work collaboratively. One way to circumvent this issue is to have teams develop a group charter, like this example group charter (Word document) created by Kate Farley (UWGB) in which students decide on their roles and commitments before beginning a project.

UW-Extension has created a helpful guide that provides more detailed suggestions on how to design group activities, which are summarized below:

  1. Provide purpose. Make sure students know why they are doing the project and why it’s important that they work in groups.
  2. Provide support. Make sure students have the tools they need (technological and otherwise) to complete the project.
  3. Set ground rules with clearly defined milestones and timelines. If you allow students to create the ground rules and milestones for their own group, they are more likely to take ownership of the project and ensure the schedule is doable for them.
  4. Provide opportunities for peer and self-evaluation: Evaluation and reflection helps students effectively hold themselves and each other accountable for the results of their collaboration.

If you’re familiar with the concept these features might sound an awful lot like the teaching with transparency framework. If that concept is unfamiliar to you, you can learn more about it here.

Alternative Forms of Grading

Many instructors and educational developers have begun giving new consideration to specifications grading, contract grading and/or labor-based grading and how they may help support more equitable assessments and grading policies. One potential benefit to these approaches is that it allows instructors to maintain a series of low-stakes assessments without overburdening students with criteria-heavy weekly assignments that can feel like “busy-work.”

In Specs- and labor-based grading, you can retain well-aligned formative assessments and activities, but alleviate some of the anxiety that these may provoke amongst students (e.g., their focus is on the outcome versus their grade)—particularly if you provide students some choice in which assessments students may complete or revise.

In his book on contract grading, Asao B. Inoue argues that labor-based grading contracts support anti-racist and social justice-oriented assessment that enhance equity in the writing classroom. Other scholars have made similar arguments about contract-based and specifications grading, all of which provide more agency to students and remove the emphasis on “grading” and “grades.”  Though there are some differences between these approaches, we encourage you to worry less about those, and focus more on whether there are elements to these approaches to grading that may work well for your class. Here are some of the core elements of “ungrading” that you may wish to consider:

  • Assignments and activities are all graded as satisfactory/unsatisfactory (or acceptable/not yet, etc.).
    • Instructors provide very transparent about what constitutes acceptable work for each assignment. In labor-based grading systems, effort is central; for specifications grading, instructors often use standards that align with work that might garner a “B” in traditional schemas.
  • Students are allowed to revise unacceptable work at least once.
  • Students have some agency or choice in the assessments/assignments they complete for the course or even for each unit/module. “Bundles” of assessments and/or grading contracts are still linked to learning outcomes.

If you’re intrigued by the possibilities offered by these approaches to grading, consider reading a bit more about each before you make a decision. Check out this presentation from UNC Wilmington’s CTE for a brief overview of these alternative grading formats.

Created by: Virginia M. Schwarz

Questions for Critiquing

  1. What course is the contract for? Are the decisions appropriate for that context, audience, purpose?
  2. How might teacher identity and identities of students impact contract grading?
  3. What assignments, behaviors, and/or labor requirements are included in the tiers?
  4. Thinking in terms of importance (essential vs optional), do you agree with placement on those tiers?
  5. Build up? (C start) or Begin high? (A start) What are the benefits of each?
  6. Is this contract negotiated with students?
  7. Is peer review and self-assessment discussed?
  8. How does the instructor present/ explain this to students, if at all?
  9. Does this contract appear to be embedded into the culture and/or assignments of the course? In what ways does this respond to a larger teaching philosophy?
  10. Is “rigor” addressed? If so, how?
  11. Is student labor on assignments accounted for? (see Asao Inoue)
  12. What are the choices in length, tone, language, naming?
  13. What design choices did the teacher make? (for example, is the contract part of the syllabus)
  14. What degree of flexibility do you perceive, and are “violations/ negotiations/ surprises” addressed?
  15. How does/doesn’t this contract address the needs of traditionally high-achieving and low-achieving students according to your perception?
  16. How might the contract potentially further the working relationship with students? Students relationships to one another?
  17. How does the contract make you feel?

Questions for Composing

  1. What are the goals and outcomes of the course?
  2. How might I/ we account for teacher and student identity?
  3. What assignments, behaviors, and/or labor requirements actually help students learn and how are those incorporated into the class? [defamiliarize learning]
  4. Which of those are absolutely essential and what could be optional? [for making tiers or designing optional projects]
  5. Build up? (C start) or Begin high? (A start)
  6. Am I ready to negotiate this contract with students?
  7. How might I incorporate peer and self-assessment (process steps)?
  8. How do I plan to present/ explain this to students (and colleagues, and admin)?
  9. How do I plan to embed this in our classroom/ program culture? In what ways does this respond to a larger philosophy?
  10. How do I talk about “rigor”—do I even include that in my rationale?
  11. Do I account for student labor and if so then how? (see Asao Inoue)
  12. What should I do in terms of length, tone, language for the syllabus/ contract?
  13. What design choices did the teacher make? (for example, is the contract part of the syllabus)
  14. What degree of flexibility should I offer, and should I discuss violations, incorporate negotiations?
  15. How does/doesn’t this contract address the needs of all students?
  16. How does the contract potentially further my working relationship with students? Students relationships to one another?
  17. How do I hope students feel after reading?

Don’t Let the Canvas Gradebook Stop You

As you contemplate each of these approaches, CATL can help you deal with navigating the Gradebook so that doesn’t hold you or your students back should you wish to use a form of labor-based, specs, or contract grading.

Schedule a CATL consultation on alternative forms of grading.

Exam Wrappers

An exam wrapper is a way for students to reflect on their experience on an exam. It is meant for learners to look again at the techniques they use to get ready for an exam, identify strategies they can use to prepare for later assessments, and consider how similar strategies might help them in their studies in and beyond your course.

Sometimes also called “exam debriefs,” these follow-up reflection activities are often called “exam wrappers” because they serve as a wrap-up for the work done on an exam. They’re also meant for students to further articulate context and relevance for what the exam covered—’wrapping’ some additional meaning around the work they’ve done.

Exam wrappers largely attempt to get at (and point students toward reflecting on) the following:

  • The amount of time and effort put into studying
  • Study habits used
  • Whether students engage with course objectives (especially to direct their studying)
  • Reasons students lose or believe they lose points (whether they missed foundational knowledge, made “silly mistakes,” environmental factors and distraction, etc.)
  • Possible interventions or adjustments

How you implement an exam wrapper is up to you. Some possible strategies include:

  • An exam wrapper counting for an improvement of one half letter grade (from BC to B, for example) on the exam.
  • Requiring students complete a wrapper to turn in alongside corrections for full or partial credit on missed questions.
  • Pairing an exam wrapper with instructor- or TA-led review sessions for later exams. Note: If you go this route, it’s still a good idea to have students complete the wrapper activity shortly after receiving feedback on the exam they’re reviewing so it and their study habits are fresh in their minds.
  • Offering the exam wrapper as ‘makeup’ work for one or more formative activities which led up to the exam.
  • Offering course-level extra credit.
  • Some combination of any or all of these!

As students complete the survey/worksheet, encourage them to think about their answers as they go. A few examples:

  • The question about techniques lists good techniques for studying. Could you adopt one or more of these?
  • There is a question about how you use the learning objectives in the course. You might not yet, but doing so is a good way to get to know why we are doing what we are in this course—including why exam questions are what they are.
  • You’re also asked why you think you lost points on the exam. For the more frequent reasons, what adjustments might you make to avoid these in the future? Do you need to study differently or maybe just slow down when taking the exam?

The last few questions in the examples provides below ask students to articulate responses to these sorts of reflections.

If you are interested in trying out an exam wrapper, we might recommend beginning with a basic Canvas Survey. We have a file you can download and import into a Canvas course to get you started.

If you’re looking for something a little more robust or want to do more with the data, you can take a look at an Example Exam Wrapper Assignment using Qualtrics here. If you’d like a copy of the survey used in this example, you can download this Exam_Wrapper QSF File (Click to Download) and import it into your Qualtrics account (click for instructions). (Note: you do not want to re-use the link in the sample assignment since you will not be able to access the data/results.) The same assignment is available here in Word document format (Click to Download) if you prefer. The Canvas Survey version above is also very similar.

Additional examples of exam wrappers for various disciplines can be found on Carnegie Mellon University’s Eberly Center page on Exam Wrappers.

For further reading, see:

  • Badir, A. et al. 2018. “Exam Wrappers, Reflection, and Student Performance in Engineering Mechanics.” 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Salt Lake City, Utah. https://peer.asee.org/30462
  • Gizem Gezer-Templeton, et al. 2017. “Use of Exam Wrappers to Enhance Students’ Metacognitive Skills in a Large Introductory Food Science and Human Nutrition Course.” Research in Food Science Education 16(1): 28-36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1541-4329.12103
  • Pate, A. et al. 2019. “The use of exam wrappers to promote metacognition.” Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning 11(5): 492-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cptl.2019.02.008

A broken chain

Avoiding Broken Links in Canvas

Has this happened to you? You open an email from one of your students that reads, “I can’t access the required reading file in week 3 of the Canvas course?” Concerned, you open your Canvas course. You check your week 3 module; it’s published and so is your “Required Readings” page. Strange. You open the course page and click on the link to the reading file; it downloads. Even stranger. Your student still insists that they cannot access the file. What is going on???

Instructors working in Canvas can occasionally encounter scenarios like the above where a link, image, or file in their Course works for them but does not work for their students. These errors can be very tricky to diagnose and are often caused by something sneaky going on “under the hood” in Canvas. Thankfully, Canvas has a tool that instructors can use to hunt out bad links in their course. This post introduces Canvas’s course link validator tool and explains how it can be used to proactively detect broken links in your courses. It will also provide a few tips for fixing these issues once they’ve been detected and best practices for avoiding these issues altogether.

Detecting Broken Links

Your secret weapon in this fight against broken links is the course link validator. The course link validator, which can be accessed from the Settings page of your course, scans all content in a course for links that may not work for any of several reasons. It will detect and report links to unpublished content, links to content in another course, and links to external websites that just don’t work. It’s a great idea to run the link validator right before you are ready to publish your course and run it again each time you make a large change or addition.

After running the link validator, Canvas will display a list of each piece of content in your course that contains at least one link that may need your attention. These problematic links are further sorted beneath a description of the cause of the error. In the example screenshot of link validator results below, the validator found five broken links in this course:

The results of a link validation check in Canvas.

  • One embedded image in a quiz question that will not work for students because the embedded image is stored in another course.
  • Three links within a single page that students cannot access because each link points to an object in another course. This page has a link to a page in another course, an embedded image stored in another course, and a link to a file stored in another course.
  • A link in a different page that points to an assignment in this course that has not yet been published.

These results illustrate two of the most common causes for confounding broken links in a course:

  1. Links pointing to unpublished files or other unpublished course content
  2. Links pointing to content that is in a different Canvas course

Both of these issues create links that appear to work fine for the instructor but do not work for students. Without a tool like the course link validator, it would be very difficult to detect these issues!

Defeating Broken Links

Whenever the link validator detects a broken link in your course, it’s time to spring into action and heal those links. Mending links that are broken because they point to unpublished content is straightforward: find that content in your course and publish it! Fixing links that point to content in other courses is trickier.

First, you need to remove the bad link. To do this, find the course content that contains the bad link and edit it. Then remove the bad link or embedded image:

  • For broken links, find the course content that contains the bad link, click edit, click the link in the editor, then click Remove Link.
    The Remove Link option in Canvas
  • For broken embedded images, put your text edit cursor after the image and backspace to remove it.

Once the bad link is removed, use the Canvas editor’s tools to create a new link that points to the course file or course page, or embed the image from your course images. If that file, page, or image you are linking to doesn’t yet exist within the course, you’ll have to upload it from your computer or import it from the other course. Recreating the link in this fashion will point it at content that is contained within the same course, ensuring your students get to where they need to go!

Why Broken Links Happen

These sneakily broken links are typically the result of a teacher trying to share something with their students that their students are not allowed to access. Naturally, teachers are afforded much wider access to a course than students. The most confusing broken links commonly point to either unpublished content or content in another course. Students can’t see unpublished content or content in the teacher’s other courses, but the teacher can!

One item type in a Canvas course that can unexpectedly cause access problems with its published status is course files. Unlike most other content in a Canvas course, you typically don’t have to manually publish course files; most files you upload to a course will be published upon upload. However, files or even entire file folders can be unpublished in your course Files page. When that happens, students will receive access denied messages after attempting to click a link to that file. To resolve this issue, the course instructor must publish the file or folder in the course’s Files page.

Links to content in another Canvas course can sneak in whenever course content is manually copied from one Canvas course and then pasted into another course. The result of copying and pasting between courses creates links to files, pages, and images that point to an outside course. When students try to follow these links, Canvas sees that they are not enrolled in that course and sends an “access denied” message. To prevent this type of broken link, never copy and paste links or images from one Canvas course into another. Instead, use Canvas’s copy and import tools whenever you need to duplicate content from one course to another.

An Access Denied Error in Canvas

Try it Out!

Whether or not you have been bitten by broken links in the past, we encourage you to run the link validator in your Canvas courses. If the validator finds any issues, take a look at those pages in your course and either remake those links or publish any unpublished link targets. You can check to see if your fixes were successful by rerunning the validator and using student view to try the links as the test student. If you’re ever unsure of how to fix an issue reported by the link validator, please don’t hesitate to contact Canvas 24/7 support via the “Help” button in Canvas, email UWGB’s Canvas support team at dle@uwgb.edu, or request a CATL Consultation for one-on-one training on finding and fixing broken links!