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Snapshot

LMS Used: TRACS
Type of Course: Online, Hybrid, Face-to-Face
Type of Interaction: Teamwork

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Many instructors recognize the benefits and challenges of collaborative learning through teamwork, including online instructors. While collaboration can lead to increased critical thinking, retention and sense of community, teamwork assignments may be difficult to grade fairly, and team members’ interpersonal conflicts may be distracting and difficult to address. In an online course, students’ level of familiarity with different communication technologies add to the challenges of collaborative learning.

Description

Instructors in the Social Work Advanced Practice Leadership online master’s degree program attempted to address some of these challenges by managing team size for effective interaction (2 to 5 or less if synchronous action is required), assigning teams based on time zones and preferred working styles, keeping team composition stable throughout the semester, focusing on assignment design and assessment, and asking teams to create charters. Examples of strategies are described below. Other strategies that address the complex business of supporting teamwork in online courses are described in the post Designing Teamwork that’s not Groan-Worthy.

Strategies

Team Composition Survey

Many groupwork theorists advocate for heterogenous team composition (e.g., varied by gender, country of origin, age, skill set, etc.) in order to expose students to a greater diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. However, especially for long-term projects, homogenous groupings along dimensions such as working style and technology competence can facilitate collaboration, the latter in particular for online teams. One approach is to assign teams based on both heterogenous and homogenous considerations based on answers to the following survey questions:

• Where do you live?
• What is your time zone?
• Briefly describe what you believe your strengths are relative to the upcoming team project.
• Briefly describe what you believe your challenges are relative to the upcoming team project.
• How comfortable are you with using online meeting technology?

Not At All

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Extemely Comfortable

• What days and times are best for you to collaborate with another student on assignments?
• What days and times are workable, although not the best, for you to collaborate with another student on assignments?
• What days and times would require you to alter your work or personal schedule in order to collaborate with another student on assignments?
• As a general rule, do you tend to work on an assignment:

The night before it is due

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Weeks ahead

• Where would you put yourself on the following continuum?

Do enough to get by

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Perfectionist

• As a general rule, what do you tend to do when you run into a stumbling block in an assignment?

Assignment Design & Assessment Strategies

Teamwork offers more benefits when assignments are open-ended team, require interdependence, and are aligned to course objectives. In addition, some courses in the program assess both a) the product created by the team and b) individual student’s contribution to team process. For example, one social work course asked students to evaluate partners’ contribution to team process using the rubric shown below, with the instructor allocating 10 of 135 possible points for a case study paper based on peer rubric ratings:

Another grading scheme might have allocated points as follows and asked students to submit with their case study a brief description of each team member’s contribution:

• 100 points – team product
• 25 points – individual contribution to team product
• 10 points – team participation rubric