Group items tagged

This article compares the work patterns of a more successful and a less successful online group collaboration and draws conclusions about strategies that instructors can promote/encourage/require to help students successfully collaborate.

Playing Devils' Advocate here.... http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-High-Tech/132093/ Would cheating in an online course be considered a "successful collaboration," or promoting positive peer-peer interactions?

If a group worked together to cheat, that certainly would be successful collaboration. I'm sure there are articles out there (that I haven't come across yet) that discuss strategies to minimize or circumvent cheating. Scaffolding assignments and requiring students to make visible all the steps in the process would help I think. Thanks!

Curtis and Lawson (2001) looked for "evidence of good quality interactions among students who are not present in the one physical site from data obtained from students' online exchanges" (p. 21). They focused on the "depth of on-task activity" (p. 21) in an asynchronous situation, which they argue is the most common form of online courses, of a small collaborative learning group. They found that "the analysis of participants' postings reveals many of the behaviors associated with collaborative learning in face-to face situations" (p. 29). However, "the students spontaneously demonstrated a need also to use synchronous communication" (p. 24). Some did this via text or email, often when they did not agree with another student and some organized synchronous chat sessions. This shows that "there is a need to incorporate among the asynchronous interactions…opportunities for real-time interactions among students" (p. 29).

This article had some great ideas for meaningful online collaborative work.

This study sets out criteria--pluses and pitfalls--to judge the effectiveness of online collaborative learning. And its conclusion summarizes with good advice: don't be afraid to overhaul and seek new methods if you find the collaboration isn't working.

this storify consists of active learning videos and resources - may want to view the Tools to Encourage Active Learning from the Hawaii Arts Alliance - this was a fun in-class activity

One of the most important professional documents in my field is the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) Outcomes Statement. This statement, the result of years of collaboration and revision, defines general learning outcomes for first-year composition (FYC) courses. Most importantly for others in our EFOT class, the statement contains sections that explain how faculty in all programs and departments can build on the preparation students receive in FYC.

This article discusses "the importance of structuring activities for balancing electronic communication during e-collaboration (i.e., videoconference, email, chat session, distributed use of group support system) to bridge cultural and stereotypical gaps, to increase profitable role repartition between the participants, and to prevent and solve conflicts." This is especially useful as we work to design our courses for diverse learners

Researchers say that some online students don't like group work. How to deal with dissonance? One idea is to have students list their reasons and then discuss. Another is to show them a video on collaboration and team-building. There are a lot of lousy team-building videos on YouTube. But here's a fun and engaging Ted Talk presentation. Why are kindergarteners better at collaboration than business school students? Tune in.

This is an unpublished research article on a model for group work in an online or blended course environment. The two salient points in this article are that the students must have unique skills for the online classroom. First they must be taught how to use the necessary technologies for collaboration and the second is that they must be taught social skills for online collaboration. The first point seems obvious, but I think the second point is often overlooked. We assume that students know how to interact with others, however interacting online is quite different than in person. Therefore these skills must be included in our curriculum.

This article is a rather old (1999) meta-analysis of the effect of small-group learning on undergraduate students in STEM majors and the outcomes of collaborative, cooperative, or mixed form learning on student achievement, attitudes and persistence. What we like about this article is that it is scientifically robust, from a really high impact (5 point impact factor) educational research journal. It serves as primary research evidence about how important small group learning can be on a number of outcomes, not just the outcome of achievement. While it doesn't address specifically online work, it is powerful research about the benefits of this kind of learning, which is really convincing, especially when we have students who might resist collaborative learning.

I won't say that this makes shifting conceptions of assessment in one's own courses less daunting, but I appreciate that it acknowledges the significant demand that changing assessment criteria can put on teachers. I have to admit that lot of the time, when I read about new assessment techniques, they sound interesting but exhausting to implement. We've seen a lot of stage-based models for education/assessment/collaboration/etc., but this one is especially clear and I like the thoroughness of the horror story example.

Dan I greatly appreciate your view point on this and can share another horror story with you that actually turned out to be a fairy-tale situation in the end! I'll make a note to discuss in tomorrow's live session. Cheers!

The more that I read about student centered learning and assessment, the more I realize that this is the direction I have been (slowly, glacially) moving in for years. Thanks for this!

This paper describes two innovative online introductory statistics courses that utilize technology to create unique interactive learning environments. In these courses, technology is used to enable students to collaborate and learn from each other. I got some ideas about how to encourage students to engage in the course.

A couple of comments here: I apologize if the link doesn't open right away. I got the article through PubMed at WHSLibrary. The article presents an interesting approach to the use of Bloom's taxonomy for grading discussion boards integrating collaborative learning process and higher-order thinking. It also does a good job discussing how to evaluate a rubric.,

Practitioners are regularly confronted with significant events which present them with learning opportunities, and yet many are unable to recognise the learning opportunity these significant events present. The ability to recognise a learning opportunity in the workplace and learn from it, is a higher-order cognitive skill which instructors should be seeking to develop in learners.

Primer for using Google Docs in your class. Provides information about various tools and plugins that enable bibliographic work, speech recognition and voice commenting, assessment using a rubric, and more.

"The NMC Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI).....designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education."

An interesting idea: student collaboration to lead and facilitate online discussions. This study says the student leaders elicited meaningful dialogue, high levels of participation and quality conversation.