I have no experiences working solely online for group projects. This is the only semester that I’ve taken exclusively distance courses. However, I have worked on several group projects in my four years at UAF in a variety of classes.
I’ve had the most difficulties with group projects in courses that are general requirement courses, rather than major-specific courses (I’m a biological sciences student). It was the pattern for me that group projects in general courses often had a larger number of students in the group (5-10 students) than group projects in my biology courses (2-4 students). The large groups were very difficult to work with at times. It was often very hard to organize a large number of schedules such that we could meet in person as a group. For those large groups, I started trying to get a more significant amount of the work completed at a distance (via email or Google Drive, etc) so that we would need to meet less often. I hope having done this in the past will help me for my group work for this class that is yet to come.
Group projects in my biology courses have gone relatively smoothly. I’m not sure if it is because the projects themselves tend to be very specific so people have well defined roles within the project from the beginning or maybe because people are coming from relatively similar backgrounds course-wise. One thing that has definitely helped in the past is that people majoring in biology tend to have most of their courses in the Murie Building so it’s not unlikely that you would run into other group members from a project throughout the day. That way it is also easy to meet up for even short amounts of time in between classes to work because you are already in the same place. This won’t be the case for my group work in this course, but hopefully the fact that it is entirely online will making communicating and working together easier because we won’t be doing any scheduling to meet up.