Session 4: Collaboration Principles and Practices

Session 4: Collaboration Principles and Practices Campus Technology Boston 2011 July 25

Common Questions about Grouping and Teaming How do you group a class into two or three person teams quickly and easily? What assignments work well? How do I/we structure assignments to ensure engagement? What is a practical step-by-step process for team assignments ? What are barriers to group work? How do learners communicate easily and well in asynchronous learning? What about grading and assessing? Learners don’t like to grade themselves or each other.

Let’s Collaborate! Let’s work on those questions… Hands-On With Collaboration

Collaboration Activities Mission: Impossible • Step 1: 2 min Group yourselves (3) • Skills courses, such as writing, math, accounting, cataloging, programming • Fact-laded content, such as chemistry, biology, history • Professional, character courses, such as ethics, management, education • Step 2: Generate a team activity for your course or a course similar to your course • Activity requires individual work and group work • Activity works towards a core concept • Step 3: Record/capture this work on a sticky, in an email, tweet, or journal • Step 4: Large group sharing

Collaboration & Community Concepts • Social presence and relatedness to others • Community support and caring for other’s success and learning • Aligning with specific personalized learning outcomes • Immersing learners into the content for multiple exposures and manipulation with the content • Learner centeredness and customization • Faculty presence – social, teaching, cognitive • Students’ zones of proximal developments • Personalization and customization – skill and content relevance Principles and Practices

Let’s walk through these questions… Large group sharing

Let’s Do a Discussion Wrap • “Discussion wrapping” is one of the most important practices in online teaching and learning • The Discussion Board is analogous to a face to face discussion • What do you do to “close out” or “wrap up” a discussion? • Some type of summary, close, or transitioning to the next activity Let’s do that now!

What next steps are on your list? Discussion Wrap on Collaboration

QUESTIONSCOMMENTS REMEMBERINGS?

Thanks so much… Class of 2027 Class of 2025 Judith@designingforlearning.org jboettcher@comcast.net

Bonus Slides

Course Projects with a Longer Life… • What projects or project elements might contribute to your course/program over time? Or beyond the institution? • Wiki on a topic that is new to discipline that is not in textbook • Personal blogs about learner's journey through a complex and challenging intellectual idea • Archive of projects that add to, organize, collect resources for key topics • Wiki that collects intellectual biography/genealogy of leading figures • Small team blogs on favorite media resources • Other ideas

Characteristics of Meaningful Course Projects • Serves learners’ needs and preferences • Encourages links to and learning of local, national or global initiatives or issues • Serves the dept/program beyond the course • Serves society beyond the course, as in web projects, wikipedia, develops knowledge of discipline • “Tickles the imagination” – source of creativity and satisfaction • Adds to a learner’s portfolio

Session 4: Collaboration Principles and Practices