The Group Exercises is a distinctive collaborative group working activity completed by approximately 170 second-year undergraduate chemistry students each year in June. The activity comprises students working in randomly allocated teams of 4-6 members to complete a structured learning package to solve chemistry problems with industrial relevance and to communicate their solutions via a presentation (and executive summary with team meeting minutes), which are formatively and summatively assessed via stage 1 and stage 2 tasks accordingly. Through this, students are able to develop their personal skills in a chemistry context. For the first time in more than 20 years of running the activity, due to COVID-19, the Group Exercises was facilitated online. How this team-based exercise for a large cohort was delivered is outlined together with lessons for future iterations pertaining to building an online community among teams and transitioning from multifaceted asynchronous and synchronous presentation assessments to a fully synchronous equivalent. An unanticipated benefit from online delivery was the potential to enhance the digital literacy and time management skills of students by having to communicate and complete the assessment virtually, and in some cases, in different time zones. Through this, such virtual collaborative working may more closely mimic how diverse teams work together within and between professional organizations and hence may serve as a useful experience to prepare students for modern teamwork after graduation.