Improving the odds of students effectively engaging in collaborative work

One instructional strategy that I use a lot in my online and on-campus courses is collaboration -- group work, teamwork, peer review, connecting with professional communities, and so forth. I like to involve students in collaboration because:

• Group work can help counter the isolation some students may feel in an online course.
  
• Exposing students to multiple perspectives and approaches can open their eyes to diverse ideas.
  
• Students can achieve higher expectations with collegial support.
  
• The quality of individual student work can be enhanced through collaboration.
  
• It is a valuable professional and lifelong learning skill.

However, when I am not thoughtful about it and don't provide some structure around students’ collaborative activities, these activities tend to lead to a lot of problems.

I have a put together a handout that lists several guidelines (24 actually, so I need at least 1 more because 24 is bugging me...chocolate to the first person who posts the 25th guideline!) for improving the odds of students effectively engaging in collaborative work. These guidelines cover:

• Creating a supportive structure for students’ collaborative work
  
• Forming collaborative student groups
  
• Helping collaborative student groups manage the work
  
• Assessing collaborative work

During our FLC online discussion on Friday, October 10th from 11am to noon, let’s explore how we engage online students in collaborative work, what types of collaborative projects we have going on, and what works and doesn’t work. See you then!