Collaboration.
Discussion forums are just the tip of the iceberg.
We should think of collaboration in online courses as a spectrum. On the one hand are the simplest collaboration activities, the ubiquitous discussion forums. At the other end would be collaborative projects that involve students working together for a sustained period of time to create something together, a product that is much more than just the sum total of discussion posts. Collaborative learning, according to the definition that I’m using here, requires that students have sustained interaction with each other for the purpose of creating something.
Collaborative learning can be annoying for students and instructors alike when it comes to organization and grading. Students worry about members of their group not pulling their weight. Instructors worry about students complaining about members of their group not pulling their weight, and to this end often develop elaborate rules and guidelines and even contracts that can suck the fun out of the whole enterprise. (There are a bajillion webpages out there providing all sorts of tips and rules for group work.)
Once you get these issues resolved, what kind of collaborative activities are worth pursuing? That surely depends on the context you and your learners find yourselves in. I think the best way to approach group work is to look at some examples and consider if they will work in your course, either as is or in some modified fashion. To that end, here are some examples that I think are particularly worth considering:
Collaborative design exercise: in a design course, students are divided into groups of three. They each submit a prototype for a design exercise, then together they create a fourth prototype drawing on the three individual prototypes. This works well both online and on the ground, and can be modified for other kinds of courses.
Collaborative note-taking: students in groups of varying sizes (even the whole course) can use Google Docs or Office 365 to collaborate on class notes (for a lecture or reading). The instructor can review, fill in gaps, ask questions, etc.
Report writing works well in courses where students need professional development practice (e.g. a report on climate crisis mitigation actions a city can take would work well in an environment or urban planning course). Having the students use professional collaboration software such as Microsoft Teams can give them a real sense of how these processes work online.
Group writing projects are similar to writing professional research reports, but are more general in nature and can be assigned in a greater variety of contexts. When they’re about course content they might appear to lack an authentic edge, but the many people end up in jobs and careers where they are often in group writing situations.
Almost any kind of iterative project that brings together individual effort (e.g. researching a particular aspect of a larger whole) with combined effort (putting it all together as a slide presentation or video or podcast or report) can be worthwhile. Students engage with each other in a meaningful manner as they focus on the task at hand. That’s good learning.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 52/60.