Group Online Projects in the Distance Ed. Classroom
by Evelyn Beck
IT’S NOT EASY, mostly due to student resistance, but online group projects can be undertaken successfully. And if they’re handled well, the experience can mirror real kinds of on-line collaboration that today’s students will face increasingly in their careers.
Students don’t like on-line groups, mainly because such groups require extra time and because they require student participation
at scheduled times, which seems contrary to the whole notion of asynchronous on-line learning. And students in Web-based courses have the same complaints about group work as students in traditional classrooms: some students do all the work.
These complaints are valid, and they present challenges for both students and instructor. As a result, we must think not only about the kind of project that will best meet course learning objectives but also about the type of activity that is possible when students are communicating at a distance.
The students in Donna Everett’s on-line MBA course at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, are about as far apart
geographically as is possible, from Kentucky to China to Australia. Their simplest group project is to choose an article from Fast Company magazine, post related discussion questions, and then summarize their classmates’ responses. They get together in a live chat area provided by the courseware and also correspond via e-mail.
More challenging is the course’s on-line press conference, in which half the group represents the media and the other half poses as a company’s business managers. For about an hour in the group chat area, they engage in questions and answers. “It’s just exactly like a press conference on TV,” says Everett. “All the reporters want to enter questions at the same time. Some will say, ‘I’m standing on my chair waving my notebook.'” Despite her initial skepticism that this activity could work as a virtual group project,
Everett now considers it “very effective.”
Everett’s students also write a case study of a business-related problem, such as the TWA air disaster, using both e-mail and an on-line “drop box” where students can exchange documents. These group activities work well in part because of the “virtual team-building” exercises Everett conducts early in the semester. “I help them understand what it’s like to be a virtual team member,” she says. “I try to set up parameters: here’s where you can meet, how you must meet.” She discusses group roles, urging each student to take on a duty such as taking notes at group meetings or e-mailing meeting reminders to each member. And at the end of each group activity, she “debriefs,” soliciting feedback on the value of the project.
At West Virginia Community College in Wheeling, West Virginia, Thomas Danford requires the students in his Web-based biology
class to work together on a writing project about such contemporary issues as gene therapy or water pollution. Relying heavily on the capabilities of Diversity University software and its multi-user, object-oriented domain, Danford’s students work together in a virtual space that combines their efforts. It also allows for groups to give live presentations at the end of the semester, sometimes with sound clips and animated graphics.
Group work demands a true sharing of student abilities. According to “Moderating Learner-Centered E-Learning: Problems and Solutions, Benefits and Implications,” an article by Curtis Bonk, Robert Wisher, and Ji-Yeon Lee in Teaching and Learning On-line:
New Pedagogies for New Technologies (Kogan Page, 2001), “The role of the instructor in such an environment is to facilitate students to generate and share information, not to control the delivery and pace of it. A key goal of team-based learning activities, therefore, is to apply expertise and experience of the participants to a group problem-solving situation or research project that helps participants accomplish something that they could not achieve individually.”
Another article co-written by Bonk, who teaches instructional systems technology and educational psychology at Indiana University in Bloomington, cites the example of an on-line graduate education course in which groups had to work together to write an Internet policy for a school district superintendent beset by demands for information access and privacy protection from parents and students.
The creativity of the above instructors in designing innovative group projects is impressive. Committed students have surely
grown from such participation, and most students enjoy the increased interaction with peers. But the demands upon their
time and the inconvenience of having to adjust to others’ schedules remain obstacles.
“They say it’s a lot of trouble and takes a lot of time-the same thing you find in business,” says Everett, who recommends using group work sparingly. But she also believes that on-line group projects are highly valuable in spite of student protests. “The instructor is kind of like a parent,” she says. “You know your children don’t want to do everything you say, but you know they should do it anyway.”
