Introduction to week 3: designing collaborative online activities and supporting online groups
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Designing collaborative online activities and supporting online groups
Welcome to week 3. It's going to be a bit busy this week. You spent quite a lot of time in Weeks 1 and 2 activities telling us about yourselves, learning about the others in the course, and starting to think about how to design activities. These activities correspond to Gilly Salmon's (2011) stages 1, 2 and 3 (refer to her model). This week the focus shifts to actively working with others. We are working at Salmon's stages 3 & 4, maybe 5. We're doing and thinking about group work.
To start with, take a look at the welcome video and the week overview.
Activities
- Task 1: Collaborative writing online (no more than 3 hours, in several online contributions) (badge activity). Small group activity: For this task we ask you to work in small groups (triads, formed in week 2 using signup sheets) to prepare a short presentation -- no more than 1 page of A4 text, or 3 presentation slides, or 2 minutes of audio/video -- which responds, in an informed, scholarly way, to the topic: "Measures for supporting online collaboration". To make this task more interesting we ask you to create your presentation using Google apps, which offer excellent collaborative authoring.
- Task 2: Discussing collaborative working (no more than 1 hour total in several short interactions). In the small group activity (Task 1) you experience working in an online team. In this task we ask you to reflect on that experience and more broadly the complexities of supporting online groups. What are some of the key ingredients for designing a good online group work activity? What resources need to be in place for online groups to be able to work well? What kinds of support do tutors need to provide? What challenges will online students meet in their group work? How, if at all, are the challenges of group work different online to face-to-face? Please post your reflections on these questions and your experiences of online group work here.
- Task 3: Read, reflect and Tweet (no more than half an hour). In this activity we ask you to read some short case studies of students using technology to do group work. As you read, tweet your reactions (with #tooc14), comments and thoughts about the tutor support issues they raise.
Readings
Key reading: Social presence in the Communities of Inquiry model. If you only read one thing this week, read this.- Week 3 Readings
