Group Assignments

Hello colleagues,

One of the requirements of creating this blog is that each individual has to choose an interesting topic of his/her choice. My topic of choice is student grouping to complete assigned projects in the programs. Student grouping is a hot topic for me, at the present time. I have been in the doctoral program at Nova for a couple of years now and in each class I enroll in there is group work to be completed. Usually, there is only one major group project to commiserate together on, and that I found to be tolerable. But, the closer I get to the completion of the required classes the more group experiences I have to tolerate. In one class that I am enrolled in this semster, there are four group projects that are required. In the beginning of the process, the professors at least assigned groups, but now it seems that the students are left alone to find groups to assign themselves to or form groups, this is extremely stressful when you do not know anyone and you are communicating through email.
My contentions are:
1. that these are basically on lines classes that we are enrolled in,
2. most of us work 40-60 hours a week,
3. we also live hundreds of miles away from each other,
4. nor do we know each other,
5. we do not have the time, patience, nor energy to contact each other on line to complete these projects effectively,
6. and sometimes the people in the groups do not work well together.

I believe that we need groups, but there has to be a better way to establish the groups. Groups, when working effectively and efficiently help each student tremendously, they really relieve some of the workload. I have worked with some GREAT groups while enrolled at Nova.

I guess that you can surmise from this post that I have a major project due and my group is not functioning or not functioning to my expectations.

What is your opinion of the topic of this post? Honest feedback is wanted and desired. I need to know whether I am alone in this dilemma. I could be just blowing smoke, and I really need to know if this is the case.

Thanks in advance for your responses,

Minnie