Group Work – Who’s Missing?
Quite often teachers want students to acquire collaboration skills and create group project assignments requiring students to work in groups. This is definitely a needed skill to learn and requires students to use critical thinking skills and the upper tier of Bloom’s Taxonomy when collaborating on a group project.
Having students in online learning programs participate in group projects is a lot more challenging to structure. Finding a time that is convenient for everyone and some type of meeting platform must be used like Skype or a VOIP platform like Blackboard or Adobe Connect. There are many other platforms for students to use to meet but those are the most prevalent ones. I keep a wiki on web conferencing platforms so feel free to review the wiki page for alternatives if you are looking for a meeting solution: http://caisefiles.wikispaces.com.
One of the frequent challenges that arises is that one person doesn’t show up or contribute to the project. One blog author, Torria Davis, Ph.D., shared that one of her colleagues recommended the “Survivor’s Clause” where the student is ‘voted out of the group like on the Survivor TV show. How do you handle this situation regardless of whether you are teaching online or face to face classes? Do you give that person the whole assignment and they do everyone’s part? Do you counsel that student or colleague and hopefully they come around in time? I would love to hear your thoughts on how you handle this situation. Please share in the comments.
