Assignment Spotlight: Jigsaw

This month's Assignment Spotlight is called Jigsaw and it comes from the K. Patricia Cross Academy. In today's blog post, I'll explain what the Jigsaw assignment is and how you can use it in your online course.  Let's jump in!

The K. Patricia Cross Academy is a great resource that shares some engaging and innovative assignment ideas and techniques that can be adapted for a variety of content topics and teaching modalities. One great feature is that the K. Patricia Cross Academy resources are completely free AND they include video tutorials and supportive handouts... everything you need to get started! As an additional bonus, almost all of the assignment activities include a video or instruction on how the assignment can be adapted to the online environment for both synchronous and asynchronous instruction.

The Jigsaw activity is a "peer-teaching" technique that provides students with the opportunity to teach their colleagues a particular topic. Overall, students are broken up into groups and each group focuses on becoming "experts" on their assigned or selected topics. Students are then broken up into new groups where there is one student from each of the expert groups. You can watch an overview of this assignment here.

One of the things I like about this activity is that it really leverages the power of groups. I think group work is severely underused in online courses. Communication, connection and a sense of community are monumentally important in online classes. Using small group activities helps to strengthen these 3 aspects. The second thing I like about this activity is that it forces students to become the teachers. Students get to learn so much more about a topic when they have to teach it, so this is always a great strategy to use.

I'd love to know if you've ever done an assignment such as this. If so, what has been your experience? If not, would you consider it? Share your thoughts in The Online Educator Facebook Group.