Introduction to TOOC Week 3
Video transcript
Welcome to week three. I’m Greg Benfield. Our focus this week is on group work, specifically how to design and support effective group work online. I think it’s important to distinguish between these two aspects. The use of technology for collaboration is my main research interest. So I’m really looking forward to this week.
There’s a bunch of reading to do and as usual we highlight the one key reading that you really should do this week. Because we think that theoretical frameworks are important to understanding and analysing educational problems and contexts and because we think you’ve probably already engaged with Salmon’s five stage model, this week we urge you to look at a different framework, the communities of inquiry model. Specifically you might find it useful to think about the aspect of this model known as social presence.
That said, we are pointing you to a number of easily digestible, practical resources this week and I would urge you to do more than just the minimum reading because this is a very complex topic and a week is a very short time to explore it.
As well, and as usual, there are a series of activities to do, three in fact this week. The small group task in which you will work in triads to prepare a short online presentation using a Google application is the one you really should do. This is an experiential learning task. We want you to reflect on your experience of working in the small group, standing back from the experience and thinking about the things you would need as a student in order to make this a fulfilling, engaging and well supported task. What do you think about the differences between doing group work in more traditional face-to-face ways and working entirely online? What’s the role of the technology mediating the various group processes? What sorts of technologies are the best ones to use for certain kinds of tasks and how to do we support students in making good choices about the technologies that they use to do their group tasks?
Successful group work is underpinned by good design: well formulated, challenging tasks for students to do; clarity about why group work is important for the task and how the task itself relates to the learning outcomes of the course; clearly specified outputs; realistic timelines; effective group size and composition for the task. We hope that you will consider aspects of design in your small group task.
I’ve worked on many very successful instances of online group work. In one example going back 10 years now every semester we would have several hundred first year business students working on what we called the virtual task in which randomly allocated groups of five or six students would work together to research and present their findings on a topic without ever meeting face-to-face. Years of running this task and many hundreds of students later no groups failed to complete the task, only one module leader was ever needed to support it, and students consistently reported their satisfaction with it.
One of the key design principles we used was explicitness about all aspects of the task. You can see on this page that we had an assessment design that included a formative stage in which the module leader could check on the groups’ progress. On this page we’ve had instructions about how to actually submit assignments using the VLE dropbox. Knowing that students would be likely to leave everything to the last minute we tried to advise them about what they should be doing each week of their task and what the key milestones would be. We provided them with explicit advice about how to prepare their presentations and gave them very clear steers about the kinds of digital tools they should use to prepare their presentations. In other words we try to anticipate every problem that students might have in doing the task and provide them with answers and supports in their online environment. So, if there were questions, the modulator called first say, ‘have you checked the course site? You’ll find the answer there.’ This meant that they could spend all the time they had on providing support for the groups in working on the content and helping them with group processes.
Other readings that you might find very useful are two resources on peer learning/peer review. One thing that online learning makes pretty easy is displaying student work to other students. Because peer review is such a powerful learning technique, group activities designed around peer review are well worth considering in your own teaching. This resource gives you some good practice guidelines and a theoretical framework to use in designing this kind of activity.
For this reason we use peer review activities in our new lecturers programme. Some of you doing this course may well have done the one we call the virtual conference if you did our open online course, FSLT. If so you could use your experience of this as a case study in trying to analyse designing and supporting effective online tasks.
The research is pretty clear that the significant problem with group work is usually around group assessment. We’re going to focus in a bit more detail on group assessments, or at least peer assessment of group work, in Week 5. In the meantime there is a useful leaflet about group work assessment that I would recommend to you in the readings for this week. We can’t just put off thinking about assessment of group work until week 5 because the assessment of group work is integral to the design of good group tasks.
No matter how good the design, group work needs to be supported. The Week 3 reading on group development and team roles includes reference to Johnson & Johnson’s seven conditions for effective cooperation.
Some of these depend on design of the task, some on prior experience and training, and some will need active support by tutors while groups are engaged with their tasks. 4, 6 and 7 are likely to be in the later category.
Tasks 2 and 3 are intended to help you draw out some of the issues of design of group work and complex questions around how we best support it. Remember that both of these tasks are themselves online learning activities and so they lend themselves to your analysis and critique. Task 2 is a fairly bog standard discussion forum, while task 3 is for those of you more inclined towards the short, sharp, compressed interactions of the world of Twitter. In both cases the educational rationale is analysing good practice about group work by trying to consider a range of experiences and thereby possible educational scenarios.
To get the most out of this week you might consider blogging about it. You’re probably going to come across lots of things that are important and useful and there’s nothing quite like synthesising them all in one place to bring all that together.
Bye for now. I hope you enjoy the week.
