You’ll find the Collaboration card on slides 3 and 4 in the full slide deck
Collaboration – front of cardCollaboration – Back of card
Moving online
There are many ways to support collaboration and collaborative activities. Keep in mind, that there is overlap with this learning type and ‘Discussion’ as well upcoming ‘Practice’ and ‘Production’.
One way that can help to distinguish them is to see collaboration as a group producing a joint output, where discussion is related to supporting students develop an understanding of a subject, and production is an individual output. Often, of course, a single item of work may have elements of all four. You may have also seen this called “Online group work”
There are several tools available to you to facilitate learner collaboration, all depending upon the design of your activity and your learning outcomes.
We know that encouraging students to work together can be tough face-to-face and even more so online so making meaningful connections with and between your learners is crucial.
When you design your Collaboration, activities consider how to make this easier for your students. How can you build in opportunities for learners to mix and become ‘socialised’ in the online space?
Engaging your learners in collaboration can take more time than you might expect and requires support and encouragement, so factor this in when you design the activity.
Some ideas could be:
Collaborative wiki – what do we know about …?
Develop a shared bookmark list – using Endnote
Mentor other learners. If you looked at Gilly Salmon’s Five Stage Model in the discussion learning type, you’ll have noticed that stage 5 is getting students to mentor each other.
Office 365 allows users to create a shared Word Document, Powerpoint, OneNote Notebook
For real collaboration – what ideas might the student have for platforms and ideas that they could collaborate on?
Over to you
Join our discussion now, we would love to read your thoughts and ideas in the comments area.
What have you tried collaborative activities in your face to face teaching? How did it work? How do you think you could adapt it for online?
We asked you to look at on online learning experience for yourself, if you have done that, how did you feel the collaborative activities went?
If you’ve tried online collaborative activities with groups of students, how did they go?
What challenges do you anticipate when designing your ‘Collaboration’ activities? How might you overcome these?
Other Dundee Resources
If you want to get your students to create a shared resource list, why not get them to use Endnote – that will help them learn to use a Bibliographic tool, and it’s got an Online version that allows for shared list creation. The LLC has a libguide on Endnote
LearningSpaces – this site! We’re using this site for a blog, however, you can also have a space to use as a Wiki, if you’re interested you can request a site
Ultra 101
If you’ve missed the Discussion post , then you’ll find a list of the tools that are useful for students to discuss – a key part of collaboration.
10: Welcome to the gradebook If you have divided your students into groups for an assessed item – this includes information about grading groupwork
Service Guides
As Collaboration is when we’re thinking about getting students to create an artefact, some of the service guides that are relevant are:
Workaround for adaptive release for groups. Sometimes you might want to have different material for different groups, but not necessarily have a formal submission via My Dundee
Padlet Padlet is often used by groups of students to co-create artefacts
Today’s topic will give you the opportunity to think about learning through Practice, and consider how this learning type could offer students active engagement in the blended and online mode to enhance their learning and build opportunities for knowledge application using simple technological methods.
Practice – Front of cardPractice – back of card
You’ll find the Practice card on slides 9 and 10 in the full slide deck
Practice is considered as the most challenging of the six learning types. Moving practice online is not straightforward and requires considerable thought and organisation to make it work well to blended and online learning (Young 2020). Let’s take a look at the Practice learning type card (slide 10) and think about how you would make good use of technology to address the types of learning activities listed.
Is there one learning activity in particular that would work well for your teaching context? If so, how might you start to address this for moving online and ensuring that the learning outcomes, learning context, and criteria for assessment are constructively aligned to the technology?
Moving Online
Recognising what digital technology can offer to achieve effective blended/online learning experiences is within your grasp and has the potential to ‘engage your students as active, critical and reflective learners’ (GCU Curriculum Design & Development Toolkit for Staff p14). The digital technology available at UoD offers learners the opportunity to Practice social, personal and methodological skills, for example if a more learner-centred approach is important, could online role-play using asynchronous and synchronous tools enable learners to experience true-to-life scenarios where access to physical environments may be restricted?
If the technology is implemented thoughtfully, learning by practice can offer students a variety of blended/online experiences to enable them to engage and become active learners.
Online Role Play
This would require the tutor to make decisions about the content, structure, setting up the activity, and pace of the event. In the School of Education and Social Work,traditional role-play is well established on the BA Social Work programme and is an effective way of delivering training scenarios to first year students, who take on the role of a social worker meeting a service user for the first time. To help students prepare, the tutor stages the exercise, assigns roles in a group and are given a brief case scenario of the background and context to the case. The students conduct role-play interviews, sometimes with an additional student who observes and gives feedback, and alternatively the social worker and service user alone. The exercise is then followed by a class discussion to guide and further consolidate learning.
Moving this traditional activity would work well online by employing just a few key tools that offer opportunities for communication and collaboration. The tutor goes far beyond their role as the subject matter expert, who would be responsible for a variety of group facilitation tasks: setting up the activity, providing instructions and netiquette guidelines, assigning group roles, monitoring progress, providing feedback, and drawing the activity together at the end. Supporting tools such as the discussion board or blog (asynchronous) or video conferencing (synchronous), would work well for this type of scenario, offering students to actively immerse in an activity-driven exercise to help build knowledge application for what they will be doing in practice.
Tools available in Dundee
Blackboard: Tests and surveys, Discussion board, Rubrics
When designing a learning activity like a discussion, it is important to plan and think about the practicalities for administering it. In the comments box below, share your thoughts in a few sentences on how you would plan, implement, assess and evaluate a practice learning type activity using the affordances of digital technology. Look back at the practice learning type card to give you some ideas of the activity types listed. It could simply be the implementation of a self-test feature to formatively assess student progress.
This topic was to help you familiarise with the learning type practice and get you to think about how technology can be adopted creatively to help transform your existing teaching approach. We are looking forward to reading your contributions, so let’s get practising!
References
Houston, S. (no date) Curriculum Design and Development Toolkit for Staff. Glasgow Caledonian University (unpublished)
