Simon Davis, Mike Dunn and I
Week long “collaborative event” where students work in groups to deliver on a brief provided at the outset. To do so they must complete daily tasks using technology which are automatically mailed to them at the start of the day. A competitive element is embedded throughout the activity with daily leader boards and prize giving at the end.
Pilot with ~40 TYMS Masters students within an Independent Study Module
Students required to work in groups to produce significant part of assessment.
Academic staff / module leaders - owners of learning outcomes for module
Support staff
IT services T&L team - specialisms in use of Google and developing student digital literacies
ELDT, specialism in embedded use of technology in curriculum and learning design
Students
Support effective student team cohesion
Introduce students to use of technology to support collaboration through meaningful activities linked to area of study
Develop independent working practices, encouraging students to make critical choices in their use of technology
Scaffold development of skills to be developed later in the module
Provide an ongoing experience over the course of a week to deliver the above and encourage reflexion during the tasks and reflection afterwards
Discussions between support and academic staff to clarify rationale and develop an appropriate “metaphor” for collaboration. In this case it was an invitation to pitch for consultancy work through the development of a consultancy firm poster / flyer. This was worked up into the initial brief provided to students at the start of the event by academic staff.
Kick off (1 hour) face to face session in PC room to introduce the tasks, provide basic primer on use of Google apps for Collaboration, create Google Groups for teams and ensure students had done the basics required for subsequent activities (Google group, shared drive and calendar) etc. Groups also required to agree roles to be taken forward in the week including a daily “coordinator”.
Daily collaborative activities are automatically e-mailed to individuals at 7am. Students are required to work in groups to complete a task / tasks that will lead them towards the completion of the final brief. Instructions typically include:
Overview of the task
Deadlines for completion
Structure of the task to support collaboration (eg coordinator creates a doc, everyone then writes in it)
Minimal technical instructions if required or links to online help
Required outputs (eg upload something to your shared Google drive)
Ongoing support / monitoring / encouragement. Support staff maintain an overview of student activity and produce very short overviews for the groups, including daily leaderboards of activity.
Final submission - students submit their completed work to the brief by a given deadline.
Staff and students vote on the submitted work to inform the award of the prize along with final analysis on collaborative effort throughout
Reflective wrap up face to face session and prize giving 1 week after initial launch.
High engagement throughout from all groups
Feedback from academic staff was positive, commenting that it effectively engaged students, fast tracked group cohesion and appeared to be effective preparation for subsequent assessment activities
Focus group feedback from students was broadly positive with students commenting that they enjoyed the activities, found them challenging and rewarding learning experiences. Although there were a number of suggestions for how the activity could be adapted the format of short, daily tasks was generally regarded positively.
Survey data with students also highlighted broad positive response and areas for development
We do not yet know if / how the skills addressed here manifested in subsequent assessment.
That, next year, we need to advertise that this event was going to happen within the module and that it would require time/commitment/group work.
Make the link to the assessment task, and other deliverable and transferable skills, clear and keep stressing them throughout the event (because the output was used by the consultant who came in to help judge their performance in the interview task but the students didn’t believe it was).
Having had the experience (and we enjoyed it as staff members, especially the gaming aspect) I think we will be more confident next year and be able to explain and flag the event ahead of time. Students felt, I think, that the week was rather sprung on them without notice.
We entered into it with a rather healthy ‘suck it and see’ attitude and were relaxed about the outcomes first time round. We now have enough knowledge, I think, to be more strategic in designing something like this into other programmes/modules.
Make sure groups are created / folders shared with all in the first session
Create clear rules about all work to be placed in the folder
Make sure you can track what you need to track
Think about the offer of dedicated training at mid point - motivation first then training
We feel that format could be transferred to other disciplines to support group working skills and digital literacy development. The automated delivery and monitoring of daily tasks could support larger cohorts, though we feel that more “safety net” support would also be beneficial. We have learned a great deal about how this approach could be refined to make it more manageable for staff and students and would look to implement these next time around.
Some of the success factors this time around include:
Clear rationale and pedagogic driver
Collaborative development with academic staff to embed in the curriculum
Link to assessment
Daily activities with deadlines delivered over a short sprint
Gamification / competition
Simon Davis - E-learning Development Team
Tom Smith, Mike Dunn - Teaching & Learning Team, Information Directorate