Colleen Worrell's List: Group Work, Group Projects, and Collaboration

"Tips for Teaching Wikis: How I explain it to students"

"My online learning community "
Video on collaboration

"To promote learning, you will want to structure online activities to encourage the kind of student interactions and active learning that foster deep learning. Deep approaches to learning -- learning for understanding -- are integrative processes where students synthesize and connect material to existing knowledge. Deep learning, which has an extensive international research base, is predicated on four key principles. As Rhem[1] summarizes: (1) Assignments should motivate students to learn and (2) they should build on a carefully structured, integrated knowledge base. Learning should include (3) active student involvement and (4) interaction among students. Careful planning can support the first two principles. The latter two can be fulfilled in part by pairing students or placing them in small groups/teams. But, simply putting students into groups, as numerous studies have indicated, does not accomplish the desired results. Principles of cooperative learning, as outlined by Millis and Cottell,[2] must be applied to achieve maximum results. Effective, creative uses of technology should rest on all we know about human learning. Not surprisingly, the same principles—outlined below—that foster effective in-class learning can also promote learning at a distance.

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"Students of today enter an increasingly globalized world in which technology plays a vital role. They must be good communicators, as well as great collaborators. The new work environment requires responsibility and self-management, as well as interpersonal and project-management skills that demand teamwork and leadership."

"Group work online has many of the pitfalls of group projects in traditional classroom settings: it’s entirely possible for group members to disagree, for tasks to be undefined and the process to be disorganized, for several people to drop the ball, and for one person to wind up doing all the work.

Sometimes, an online setting can make these problems worse—but team work in online classrooms doesn’t have to be a headache. Here are a few tips on how
you can get the most from group projects in your online classes. "

"Students learn best when they are actively involved in the process. Researchers report that, regardless of the subject matter, students working in small groups tend to learn more of what is taught and retain it longer than when the same content is presented in other instructional formats. Students who work in collaborative groups also appear more satisfied with their classes. (Sources: Beckman, 1990; Chickering and Gamson, 1991; Collier, 1980; Cooper and Associates, 1990; Goodsell, Maher, Tinto, and Associates, 1992; Johnson and Johnson, 1989; Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, 1991; Kohn, 1986; McKeachie, Pintrich, Lin, and Smith, 1986; Slavin, 1980, 1983; Whitman, 1988)"

"According to Wikipedia, the term collaborative writing refers to work created by a group collaboratively rather than by one person individually. Collaborative writing is useful for projects, for peer-editing, and for many other writing tasks limited only by teacher/student imagination. Web-based collaborative writing tools may be used by teachers to provide feedback on student assignments, to make suggestions and comments on a projects and highlighting required changes to a member of the project.

In general, collaborative writing tools provide flexibility and usefulness. Collaborative writing tools can vary, ranging from the simplicity of a wiki to more advanced systems. Many web-based writing tools have features that mimic the typical formatting and editing facilities of a standard word processor. Some may offer live chat, live markup and annotation, co-editing, and version tracking.

Finally, collaborative writing and Web 2.0 work together seamlessly. Collaborating students need not be in the same room, or even the same school/city/state/country. And their work, usually password-protected, may be accessed from any Internet-enabled computer. So a student, or team of students, may begin work on a school computer and continue working after the school day on any other Web-enabled computer, whether that computer is physically at a youth center, at a library, or in the student's home. These are the basic advantages of Web 2.0 tools; so now let's look at four of them."

"Most e-learners have mixed feelings about group work and the activities they've had to do with their classmates.

Perhaps you've had the same experience: you loved going to the discussion board and sharing ideas and discussing the course readings. But, when you had to work with the same individuals on an online group project, it was another issue altogether."

Links to various resources and reports

This post is 1st in a 3 part series on the topic of group work in online learning communities. Post 2 will be about strategies for effective group work, and post 3, successful evaluation and outcomes.

"I thought it would be interesting to add an addendum to my three-part series on group work in online environments by including a selection of comments from students from the very same courses I discussed in the previous posts on group work. The series focused on the why, what and how of implementing and executing group strategies, yet I think it may be helpful for readers to consider student feedback, and appreciate the group process from student perspective."

"In 1997 a partnership was created between the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM)’s Virtual University and the University of British Columbia (UBC). This partnership resulted in the development of a Certificate in Technology-based Distributed Learning, a series of five graduate courses launched internationally in the fall of 1997. This presentation will explore the international project work and online collaborative experiences of a group of international students registered in a Web-based, graduate-level distance education course offered by UBC and its partner, ITESM."