Five Steps to Improving Online Group Work Assignments

April 20, 2015

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By: Gregory Wells in Online Education

Online Group Projects — Yikes! You can hear the moans and groans of students echoing through your computer monitors as you start the first week of your online course. The reasons for requiring a group project vary from one discipline to another, but there are educational and career motives for requiring group projects. Students will have an opportunity to develop team skills, improve communication skills, and leverage their own personal interests and experiences to contribute to a group project.
The skills learned by participating in a group project are applicable to nearly any career that a student is currently interested in or will be interested in at a future date. It is rare in today’s global economy that an individual will work independently on a project. Therefore, it is important that opportunities are provided to students to not only learn content, but to apply that content in a practical, near real-world environment.
Group projects may also cause both students and instructors additional work due to the potential issues that may arise during the course of the project. Issues often involve questions and concerns around grading, equal distribution of work, communication pitfalls, and managing expectations. The following guidelines offer some ways to manage online group projects and establish clear objectives in order to facilitate a robust and engaging experience for each member of the group. These guidelines are based on past experiences as an instructor in computer information systems. You may need to adjust the guidelines based on the specific project you assign.

1. Define the Project

The project should be integrated into the course objectives and not be viewed as an extra assignment or busy work. The project should allow students to practice specific skills based on the objectives of the course and demonstrate the ability to apply learning to a specific project.

2. Establish Milestones

The project should include specific milestones during the course. For example, require an outline, a project scope, a requirements document, and other pertinent deliverables. This will provide students with the opportunity to work on the project during the course, offer instructors an opportunity to gauge progress and provide feedback, and reduce student stress in terms of submitting one large project at the end of the course without any incremental deliveries and feedback.

3. Use the Learning Management System (LMS)

As part of the group project, encourage the use of your LMS. You can offer private group discussion areas, chat areas, and other collaboration tools that will encourage both communication and participation. You can choose to monitor these as well if needed. This promotes the use of the LMS features and offers exposure to different tools that the students may use in future online courses.

4. Simplify and Clarify Grading

This is perhaps the most difficult item to address. Groups are made up of individuals and each individual brings a set of expectations and values to the group. It is imperative that you establish clear grading expectations for the group project. You may choose to grade each participate separately or provide one grade for each project deliverable and apply that grade to all participants. The approach to providing one grade to all participants is my preference. I would also recommend periodic team evaluations to be completed. You can require this as the group delivers the incremental components of the project and to gain insight as to how each member is contributing. The peer evaluation may also be used as a percentage of the grade.

5. Provide Encouragement

This may be the first time students have participated in a group project, and it is important as an instructor to encourage and communicate the specific details of the project. You should also encourage each member of the group to utilize his/her strengths. Perhaps there is a member who has strong technical or writing skills and the group should recognize this early in the project and make use of those strengths. Finally, as an instructor you should encourage each group to select a project that each member is able to contribute to and gain valuable lessons from the project. You can require that each group submit an outline or summary for approval as well.
Following these guidelines will not eliminate all of the potential issues that come into play with online group work assignments, but these guidelines will certainly minimize the issues and turn those moans and groans into excited and energized students that can apply the group project to future projects in their careers.

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Save the Last Word for Me: Encouraging Students to Engage with Complex Reading and Each Other

April 13, 2015

By: Aimee deNoyelles, EdD; Janet Mannheimer Zydney, PhD; and Kay Kyeong-Ju Seo, PhD in Online Education

Online discussions are often implemented in college classes to allow students to express their understanding and perceptions about the assigned readings. This can be challenging when the reading is particularly complex, as students are typically reluctant to share their interpretations because they are not confident in their understanding. This can inhibit meaningful interactions with peers within an online discussion.
Through a review of research, we found that more structured discussions tend to exhibit higher levels of shared cognition (deNoyelles, Zydney, & Chen, 2014). One highly structured and interactive strategy to support students as they discuss complex readings in an online discussion is to use a protocol. Although many different kinds of online protocols exist (see McDonald, Zydney, Dichter, & McDonald, 2012), they all establish a well-defined goal, set clear roles and rules for interactions, and clarify deadlines. They also can foster an environment where people feel freer to value diverse ideas and learn from one another. A protocol called Save the Last Word for Me is specifically designed to have students openly interpret complex text (McDonald et al., 2012).
We implemented the Save the Last Word for Me protocol in an online graduate course on educational technology (Zydney, deNoyelles, & Seo, 2012). Students read articles about a complex theoretical framework for designing technology-based learning environments and then engaged in an online discussion. In the beginning of the week, half of the class (about six or seven students) was asked to create a discussion thread which included a brief passage from the readings that they thought was both important and complex. They were told not to reveal why they chose the passage, in order to encourage other students to openly interpret it.
During the middle of the week, two students posted a reaction to each passage, offering their interpretations. At the end of the week, the students who first selected the passage posted a final reaction (“last word”), revealing their original interests in the passages and reflecting on what they learned from reading the interpretations from the other two students. A similar discussion took place the following week, with the other half of the students posting the passages.
To better understand the influence of Save the Last Word for Me, we compared it to a similar discussion from another class section of the same course in which students responded to an open-ended initial prompt based on the same readings and then replied to at least one other student’s response (Zydney et al., 2012). Through the analysis of discussion posts, we found that students who used the Save the Last Word for Me protocol engaged in more shared cognition and took greater ownership of the discussion than the other class. The increase in interaction likely resulted from the defined roles for communication that explicitly prompted students to reply to one another and work together to interpret the passages.
Student feedback was also favorable. Several students remarked that they enjoyed seeing how each student made different connections to the text. In addition, many students voiced that the protocol helped them get to know one another better. One student shared that he enjoyed “getting into someone else’s head and seeing what intrigues them.” The Save the Last Word for Me structure made it less risky for students to choose passages that they found difficult, and more free to openly interpret a passage even if they were not confident in its intended meaning (Zydney et al., 2012).
Save the Last Word for Me could be used in any class that involves a complex reading or ideas that may strike people differently. This could involve undergraduates or graduates, and the approach can be adapted to different course formats. For instance, in a face-to-face class, students could be asked to write down a complex passage on a piece of paper, and then have a few minutes to try and interpret others’ passages (see McDonald, Mohr, Dichter, & McDonald, 2013 for this and other in-person protocols). A whole class discussion could follow, allowing the teacher to assess what the students find complex and providing an opportunity for facilitation and direct instruction as well. For classes that are larger in size, several smaller groups could be formed to keep the discussion manageable.
References
deNoyelles, A., Zydney, J.M., & Chen, B. (2014). Strategies for creating a community of inquiry through online asynchronous discussions. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 10(1), 153-165.
McDonald, J.P., Mohr, N., Dichter, A., & McDonald. E.C. (2013). The Power of protocols: An educator’s guide to better practice. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
McDonald, J.P., Zydney, J.M., Dichter, A., & McDonald, E.C. (2012). Going online with protocols: New tools for teaching and learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Zydney, J.M., deNoyelles, A., & Seo, K. (2012). Creating a community of inquiry in online environments: An exploratory study on the effect of protocols on interactions within asynchronous discussions. Computers & Education, 58(1), 77-87.
Aimee deNoyelles, University of Central Florida. Janet Mannheimer Zydney, University of Cincinnati. Kay Kyeong-Ju Seo, University of Cincinnati.

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Pedagogical Knowledge: Three Worlds Apart

April 15, 2015 By Maryellen Weimer, PhD We know a lot about teaching and learning, but our knowledge is scattered across three separate domains. Educational research The first knowledge domain is centered on the world of educational research that's been advancing what we know about teaching and learning for more than a hundred years. There's hardly an educational issue that hasn't been studied in education or its associated subfields, like educational psychology, adult learning, and higher education. On this large empirical foundation we could rest a more evidence-based instructional practice. But educational research remains largely unexplored by those who teach, partly because there aren't strong norms expecting college teachers to grow and develop their instructional knowledge, but mostly because the journal articles describing these studies and their findings aren't written for practitioners. They're written to inform the next round of research. That makes them tough for outsiders to read and often researchers aren't focused on the practical implications of their work. Then there's the disdain for educational research held by some faculty. "Why should we bother with those who theorize, hypothesize, and 'study' what we do every day in the classroom?" I was asked recently. So, there's nothing we can learn from this work? How naïve is that? I admit that not all educational research is great scholarship, but is all the work done in any discipline flawless? Discipline-based pedagogy Then there's the world of pedagogical knowledge that exist within our disciplines. An increasing amount of it is empirical, and it is practitioner scholarship that makes it more applied and with clearer implications. Some faculty read this type of scholarship (not many), and still fewer contribute to it. The work is based in the disciplines because that's where it often gets counted. And although this scholarship still doesn't get counted as often as it should, it's valued and rewarded today way more often than it used to be. But there's a couple of problems with the disciplinary focus on teaching and learning. It reinforces the belief that teaching in a particular field is unique, and if you don't know the field you can't possibly know anything about how to teach it. Certainly the content—how knowledge of it advances, how it's organized, what counts as evidence, for example—has implications for how it's taught. Teaching problem solving and teaching themes from a novel are not the same. But there are many aspects of teaching and learning that transcend disciplinary boundaries—you wouldn't be reading this blog if you didn't believe that. But then not everybody is reading this blog, or the cross disciplinary work on teaching and learning, or pedagogical scholarship from other fields. It's possible to live in a pedagogical world and miss the fact that it is part of a much larger universe. The disciplinary focus also prevents us from seeing the weight of evidence that has accumulated for certain instructional approaches—take group work, for example. There is not a discipline where faculty are not using groups, where there is not empirical and experiential evidence that students can learn from and with each other in groups. The learning doesn't happen automatically, but when group work is carefully designed, implemented, and assessed, there is an enormous amount of evidence supporting that it effectively develops content knowledge and group interaction skills. Edited by respected scholar Maryellen Weimer, The Teaching Professor delivers the best strategies supported by the latest research for effective teaching in the college classroom. If you enjoy reading The Teaching Professor Blog here on Faculty Focus, the newsletter has even more of what you're looking for. Learn More » Experiential knowledge Finally, there's the personal world of experiential knowledge, which is the one that faculty know the best and trust the most. For those of us who have never been trained to teach, it's what we've learned over the years; usually by the seat of our pants and in the school of hard knocks. It's what works for us and if the evidence says otherwise, most of us challenge the evidence before questioning our experience. Most of time, our experiential knowledge is valid. It's problematic when this internally derived knowledge base is the only or main source of instructional understanding. Teaching needs a regular infusion of ideas and information from outside—to confirm what is believed and to enlarge what is known and practiced. I often wonder if teaching and learning don't continue to be devalued because they don't rest on a well-known and widely accepted knowledge base. We have what we need to construct one, but we have knowledge worlds that are dispersed and largely unaware of one another. How do we get them to realize that they circle the same sun?

Using Student-Generated Reading Questions to Uncover Knowledge Gaps

March 30, 2015

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By: Erika G. Offerdahl, PhD and Lisa Montplaisir, PhD in Educational Assessment, Effective Teaching Strategies

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Student-Generated Reading Questions: Diagnosing Student Thinking with Diverse Formative Assessments, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 42 (1), 29-38. The Teaching Professor Blog recently named it to its list of top pedagogical articles.
As instructors, we make a myriad of assumptions about the knowledge students bring to our courses. These assumptions influence how we plan for courses, what information we decide to cover, and how we engage our students. Often there is a mismatch between our expectations about what students know and how students actually think about a topic that is not uncovered until too late, after we examine student performance on quizzes and exams. Narrowing this gap requires the use of well-crafted formative assessments that facilitate diagnosing student learning throughout the teaching process.
Within large-lecture courses in particular, instructors have traditionally relied on the use of verbal questions to gauge student learning. Verbal questioning is limited, as it reveals the thinking of only those students most willing to respond. Often these are the high-performing students in a class. In contrast, student-generated reading questions (SGRQs) provide the opportunity and incentive for all students to submit questions, providing the evidence necessary to make inferences about the range and extent of all students’ conceptions. As evidenced through content analysis, SGRQs have the potential for characterizing the “conceptual ecology” of the class as a whole. While formative assessment is not a new idea, most research on its effective use in undergraduate science courses has focused on implementation in introductory courses and been limited to pedagogies that make use of clicker questions. This exploratory study provides preliminary data to spark a conversation about the diverse ways in which we can effectively assess student understanding in ways that support conceptual development.

Methods

The context of the study was an upper-level, large-lecture biochemistry course offered at a research-intensive university in the southwestern United States. This was the first course of a two-semester sequence for biochemistry and cellular biology majors and was team-taught by three instructors. Pre-requisites for enrollment in this course were introductory biology, general chemistry, and organic chemistry.
A regular reading question assignment was integrated as a formative assessment prompt to collect evidence of student thinking in the form of SGRQs. Students were instructed to approach each reading assignment with the goal of achieving deep conceptual understanding. We expressed our expectation that through this process, students would certainly think of at least one question relevant to the material at hand. Students were instructed that their questions should not focus solely on factual material; rather, a reading question should also describe what conceptual problems the individual has with the material and how the individual arrived at that question. They then submitted the SGRQs electronically to the instructors prior to a lecture on the topic.
Eleven reading questions submissions were collected from each student throughout the semester. Submissions were often one or more paragraphs long and sometimes included more than a single question. Each submission was worth a maximum of three points. Students were allowed to drop one reading question score. There were a total of 700 points possible in the course; reading questions counted for 4% of the total grade.
To characterize the utility of the reading question assignment in producing high-quality evidence of student thinking, we analyzed the resulting SGRQs as related to three learning outcomes (Fig. 2). These learning outcomes reflect basic skills that are likely to be articulated in syllabi in the molecular life sciences. The unit of analysis was the student submission in its entirety. Often, students posed more than one question per submission. Therefore multiple codes could be associated with any single submission in each of the analyses described below.

Fig. 2

A common goal of undergraduate science courses is to develop students’ understanding of and abilities to engage in scientific inquiry. Just as science is a process that sprouts from questions about the natural world, our own students must learn to approach inquiry by posing insightful questions. Therefore, a reasonable learning outcome in the life sciences might be to increase students’ abilities to ask “good questions”—those that hold a kernel of a research hypothesis. We hypothesized that SGRQs might be useful for diagnosing students’ questioning abilities. To this end, we revised an existing taxonomy for characterizing students’ written questions in introductory biology and applied it to our SGRQs. The levels of the taxonomy represent a progression in students’ questioning from superficial or definition-seeking questions to more sophisticated questions that synthesize information and more closely resemble those of practicing scientists.
Much of the assigned reading associated with this reading question assignment was a review of topics covered in introductory courses (such as natural selection and evolution in introductory biology) or explicitly reviewed earlier in the semester (as was the case of principles of chemistry). Yet the content analysis indicates that the concepts that many students are still actively trying to make sense of and build upon relate to fundamental ideas and specific topic areas with which these students were likely to have had significant prior experience. This was somewhat surprising given that this course is specifically designed for biochemistry and molecular biology majors, students who are often motivated to perform well in introductory courses. Although the conceptual snapshots revealed by this analysis certainly represent possible entry points for instruction, they also highlight how these entry points might be different than those an instructor may anticipate based on students’ prior coursework.

Implications for Teaching

Instructors routinely assign textbook readings in undergraduate courses. Incorporating a reading question assignment is a simple, easy-to-implement task that reinforces the importance of reading course materials. The product of such an assignment, student-generated reading questions, has real applicability in the classroom. For research purposes we worked to systematically create and apply a coding rubric; but in practice we know that an instructor can quickly “bin” student data into rough categories, even with very large classes. At a minimum, this type of quick analysis provides a starting point for lectures to meet learners at their current level of understanding.
Taking it one step further, instructors can maximize the benefit by identifying and sharing themes in students’ responses as conceptual snapshots with the entire class. For example, an instructor could communicate the prevalence of a representative sample SGRQ and then devise lecture activities to clearly address gaps evident in the question or connect ideas between questions.
Erika G. Offerdahl is an associate professor at North Dakota State University. Lisa Montplaisir is an associate professor at North Dakota State University.
Excerpted with permission from Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 42 (1), 29-38.