Helping students get to know each other is important for creating a learning community in any course, but that importance is doubled when teaching online students who may already feel isolated. and tripled if you are going to ask them to devise their own groups.

Facilitating these important social connections can certainly be successful online, though it may take a bit more structure, intention, and time than you are used to. Following are some ideas that might be useful for your online classes:

Rep Yourself (Discussion)

Ask students to represent themselves and their interests, hobbies, passions, enthusiasms, homes, using only pictures, GIFs, emoji, audio, video, etc...and respond to their classmates in kind.

Introduce Each Other (Breakout)

Divide students into groups in a breakout with the goal that, upon return to the main room, they introduce someone else. This is traditionally done in pairs, but larger groups can lead to interesting results as they negotiate the eventual pairings.

One or the Other (Discussion or Breakout)

Create breakout rooms or boards representing contrasting pairs (e.g. coffee, tea; cats, dogs; book, movie; vanilla, chocolate) and have your students self-select and discuss why they chose the room or board they are in.

Tell Them What You Want (Discussion)

If students are familiar with the goals, expectations and syllabus for the course, have them share what they are most interested in, ideas and concepts they want to know more about, but don't see, etc. You can ask them to share links to elaborate.

Three P's (Discussion or Synchronous)

"Divide students into small groups, where they share three facts about themselves: something personal, something professional and something peculiar, such as an interesting hobby or habit." (source)

Two Truths and a Lie (Discussion or Breakout)

The classic game, in which participants make three statements, one of which is a lie, and the rest guess which are which.

One Word (Discussion)

"Students think of one word that best describes them or their life. They start their initial discussion post by stating this word in bold, then describes why they chose that word. Students review peers’ posts and finds someone whose word resonates with them. Replying to that post with the connection and tries to find two other nouns that the two classmates have in common."

X-Word Story (Discussion)

Have students introduce/represent themselves in just X (5-8 is common) words and then have them comment in kind.

Commonalities (Discussion or Breakout)

Divide students into pairs or small groups and ask them to find a number of things in common: with pairs, 10 is reasonable, reduce the number as the groups grow larger.