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It's a collaborative Meta- Padlet about our Padlet. Whoa.

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PBL3 Topic3 - A Padlet based presentation

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1. Robert TS (ed): Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning in Higher Education. Idea Group Publishing, 2005
2. Appana, Subhashni: A Review of Benefits and Limitations of Online Learning in the Context of the Student, the Instructor, and the Tenured Faculty International Journal on ELearning; Norfolk 7.1 (2008)
3. Heng-Yu Ku,Hung Wei Tseng,Chatchada Akarasriworn: Collaboration factors, teamwork satisfaction, and student attitudes toward online collaborative learning. Computers in human Behaviour. Elsevier, 2014

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6. Additional costs of collaborative online learning

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6. Additional costs of collaborative online learning

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- technology costs
- teaching the teachers (time)
- preparing students for online collaboration (time)
- frustration and withdrawal (quality)

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5. The benefits of working in groups (Quoted from Roberts TS 2007)

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5. The benefits of working in groups (Quoted from Roberts TS 2007)

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Levin (2002a: p5) indicated that, when it came time for them to partake in real world employment, students involved

in group learning would have developed the skills of...

•

developing rapport with others

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negotiating a framework for working with others

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generating and sustaining motivation and commitment to working together

•

standing back from the hurly-burly of teamwork and

•

making sense of what is going on in one’s team

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coping with stressful situations that arise

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evaluating the working of one’s team

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recognising and making the most of individuals’

dispositions to prefer particular team roles

•

building up one’s teamwork expertise

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3. The 7 problems of online group learning:

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3. The 7 problems of online group learning:

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Problem #1: student antipathy towards group work

Problem #2: the selection of the groups

Problem #3: a lack of essential group-work skills

Problem #4: the free-rider

Problem #5: possible inequalities of student abilities

Problem #6: the withdrawal of group members, and

Problem #7: the assessment of individuals within the groups.

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7. Reflecting towards your contribution towards the collaboration

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7. Reflecting towards your contribution towards the collaboration

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1. How much did I contribute?  Was is sufficient/relevant/meaningfull?
2. Did all members of the group contribute to the task/project/problem solving in a meaningful way?
3. What could be done better for the  group to function more efficiently?4. What did I learn from the collaboration?

5. What was the outcome of the group task?
6. Did it fullfill its purpose?

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11. How does the institution support that value?

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11. How does the institution support that value?

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If an institution intends to engage in or roll out online learning/collaborative learning communities, it is  imperative that it puts in place the infrastructure and support to roll it out.

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Collaborative learning works best with a shared VISION. And the more concrete the VISION the better it is for everyone.

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2. For whom is online collaboration simple and for whom is it difficult

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2. For whom is online collaboration simple and for whom is it difficult

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- Introvert vs extrovert?
- Language skills? - Different people in different branches can have different "languages" - different mindsets, different jargon, different ways of approaching problems.
- more than just technical aspects...

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Assesment is important in that it must take place.
Use of "rubrics" - grading scale, for example 0 to 5 on different aspects

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8. Technical challenges in the online environment

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8. Technical challenges in the online environment

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- if you are really interested in the problem, then the challenges can be overcome
- if you are not interested, then the technical issues will be overwhelming
- The teacher or the real life meeting will never be replaced by the online environment. However, this does not mean that that online collaboration and learning should exclude a teacher. The teacher is in effect the navigator and facilitator of learning in communities.

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4. The value of collaborative learning/learning communitues

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4. The value of collaborative learning/learning communitues

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- A group can be more than the sum of its parts. Particularly if the task is suited to collaboration and also if there is a chance for discussion and reflection between group members at multiple time points.

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12. What kind of assignments are suited to collaboration?

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12. What kind of assignments are suited to collaboration?

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Brainstorming.
Innovating. A business plan.
Different skills and a complex task. A task where one person could not, alone, complete the task. For example - a project where the students background are complementary - students with background in technical fields, design, etc...
Different views or perspectives on the same problem.
Shared vision.

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What is true for individual assignments holds true for group assignments: it is important to clearly articulate your objectives, explicitly define the task, clarify your expectations, model high-quality work, and communicate performance criteria.

But group work has complexities above and beyond individual work. To ensure a positive outcome, try some of these effective practices (adapted from Johnson, Johnson & Smith, 1991) or come talk to us at the Eberly Center.

Create interdependence

While some instructors don't mind if students divvy up tasks and work separately, others expect a higher degree of collaboration. If collaboration is your goal, structure the project so that students are dependent on one another. Here are a few ways to create interdependence:

Assign roles (.doc) within the group that will help facilitate collaboration.
In a semester-long research project for a history course, the instructor assigns students distinct roles within their groups: one student is responsible for initiating and sustaining communication with the rest of the group, another with coordinating schedules and organizing meetings, another with recording ideas generated and decisions made at meetings, and a fourth with keeping the group on task and cracking the whip when deadlines are approaching. The instructor rotates students through these roles, so that they each get practice performing each function.

Devote time specifically to teamwork skills

Don't assume students already know how to work in groups! While most students have worked on group projects before, they still may not have developed effective teamwork skills. By the same token, the teamwork skills they learned in one context (say on a soccer team or in a theatrical production) may not be directly applicable to another (e.g., a design project involving an external client.)

To work successfully in groups, students need to learn how to work with others to do things they might only know how to do individually, for example to...

assess the nature and difficulty of a task

break the task down into steps or stages

plan a strategy

manage time

Students also need to know how to handle issues that only arise in groups, for example, to:

explain their ideas to others

listen to alternative ideas and perspectives

reach consensus

delegate responsibilities

coordinate efforts

resolve conflicts

integrate the contributions of multiple team members

Here are a few things you can do both to help students develop these skills and to see their value in professional life.

Establish ground rules.
Create ground rules for group behavior or ask students to do so themselves. Group ground rules can include things such as: return e-mails from group members within 24 hours; come to meetings on time and prepared; meet deadlines; listen to what your teammates have to say; respond to one another's comments politely but honestly; be constructive; criticize ideas, not people. You might then ask students to formally agree to these ground rules by signing a group learning contract (Barkley, Cross & Major, 2005). Find sample team contracts here...

Foster metacognitive skills.

Encourage students to assess their own strengths and weaknesses (e.g., tendency to procrastinate, openness to criticism, strong oral communication skills) and to consider how these traits could potentially affect group dynamics. One instructor gives students a self-assessment survey and lets group members compare their answers. Find sample self-assessments here...

He then asks: What mechanisms could your group put in place to capitalize on these strengths and compensate for these weaknesses? Answers generated include setting hard deadlines (if a number of group members are procrastinators), developing a system of turn-taking to make sure that everyone has the chance to speak (if there are shy group members), using flow charts to represent the task (for group members with a visual orientation or weak language skills), etc.

Build in individual accountability

It is possible for a student to work hard in a group and yet fail to understand crucial aspects of the project. In order to gauge whether individual students have met your criteria for understanding and mastery, it is important to structure individual accountability into your group work assignments.

In other words, in addition to evaluating the work of the group as a whole, ask individual group members to demonstrate their learning via quizzes, independent write-ups, weekly journal entries, etc. Not only does this help you monitor student learning, it helps to prevent the "free-rider" phenomenon. Students are considerably less likely to leave all the work to more responsible classmates if they know their individual performance will affect their grade.

To create individual accountability, some instructors combine a group project with an individual quiz on relevant material. Others base part of the total project grade on a group product (e.g., report, presentation, design, paper) and part on an individual submission. The individual portion might consist of a summary of the group's decision-making process, a synthesis of lessons learned, a description of the individual student's contributions to the group, etc.

One statistics instructor assigns student groups the task of presenting, synthesizing, and evaluating a set of articles on a particular topic. It is important to him that every group member have a firm grasp of the complete set of readings, even if they individually only present one or two. Thus, he builds individual accountability into the project by warning students in advance that he will ask each of them questions about the readings they did not present. This helps to ensure that students read the full set of articles, and not just the readings they present.

References

Barkley, E.F., Cross, K.P., and Major, C.H. (2005). Collaborative learning techniques: A handbook for college faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R., & Smith, K. (1998). Active learning: Cooperation in the college classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.

Thompson, L.L. (2004). Making the team: A guide for managers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.

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What are best practices for designing group projects? - Eberly Center - Carnegie Mellon University

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What is true for individual assignments holds true for group assignments: it is important to clearly articulate your objectives, explicitly define the task, clarify your expectations, model high-quality work, and communicate performance criteria. But group work has complexities above and beyond individual work.

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9. What makes collaborative learning and learning communities work?

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9. What makes collaborative learning and learning communities work?

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A chance to really work through the problem together, going back and forth between individual and then group reflection.  This requires open communication, a space to share ideas without being judged or put down (it even letting poor ideas come up to discussion). 'Real life' tasks with 'real life' roles could make this work.