There are several practical issues to be addressed by the instructor. Free riders are usually identified by students themselves as their strongest objection to team work. If the students are doing nothing more than aggregating their efforts without integration of the final product, then they may as well be working separately so that they can at least learn how to carry out a project from start to finish. Very often social hierarchies pervasive in our society involve structures of respect and attention that will be closely reflected in the ways people interact even in the most straightforward group projects. Here are some suggestions to mitigate the impact of such issues on team assignments.
Free rides are most common when the free riders can remain invisible.
Make sure that each student has an identifiable role to play both during the preparation to do the work, and during the actual task performance. This visibility is not only the task of the instructor. Since students are more often aware of who is contributing and who is not, building a mutual peer assessment component into the final grade is another way to create pressure on those who otherwise could fall behind. Transaction costs can be diminished through the use of asynchronous group forums, group mail reflectors, emailed file attachments, and synchronous prearranged live chat rooms. The composition fallacy is not merely a feature of the use of team-based approaches, since individual assignments can as easily be assembled without much sense of overall perspective.