Assignments

Most assignments can be collaborative assignments as long as the deliverable has a clear learning outcome associated with both collaboration and the assignment. A collaborative assignment needs to have set guidelines throughout the process. For example,

• Purpose and focus provides a sense of direction for the students to establish their own directives that follow the purpose and focus on the assignments. This can range from establishing one deliverable with multiple stages for planning, to creating several learning outcomes that can be translated into collaborative learning conversations.
• Relationships among peers need to be explicitly stated to provide a reminder that there are multiple voices, expertise, and cultural contexts ongoing in the collaborative assignment.
• Collaboration needs to be emphasized from defining what it means to collaborate so as to not fall into cooperative work where each student divides the work and does it independently.
• Inquiry needs to be developed from the onset of the collaboration. Inquiring into each other’s expertise helps foster relationships and share knowledge. But this inquiring feeling does not happen automatically. It needs to be developed through the collaborative assignment.
• Leadership means having a distributed pattern of leadership within the collaboration where all involved cooperate and support each others mutual learning by leading particular initiatives, participating in collaborative groups, and sharing knowledge to others.

Building capacity and support is the ability to create conditions, opportunities and experiences for collaboration and mutual learning.

The assignment and learning outcomes should provide a framework to approaching organizing groups. While instructors might gravitate to arrange groups according to several collaborative learning outcomes that look at creating the most diverse groups, this may be a difficult task to accomplish as some lead to bias interpretations of what diversity is. To offset this, instructors should approach organization of groups on the expectations that there will be a shared and distributed interdependence across all group members.

• Roles should be left for students to negotiate who should be in charge of what in the collaboration. However, these predesigned roles by the instructor should already involve a sense of shared learning and interdependence on the other roles.
• Accountability provides a sense of trust where each role is dependent on each other to complete the collaborative assignment.
• Shared space needs to be organized where students can get an opportunity to learn from each other and converse about their own experiences, whether it be online or in class.

Just as creating and organizing are important to the success of the collaborative assignment, so is the assessment. The assessment of the collaborative assignment is dependent on the effectiveness of the instructor’s ability to provide clear guidelines for the collaboration. While it is simple to assess the final product, collaborative writing assignments should be assessed holistically - the process, the instructor, and peer interaction.

Why grade the process rather than the output?

If the output of the assignment is prioritized in the assessment, it offers little incentive for individual students to help manage group interaction and instead focuses on getting the assignment done. By changing the focus to the process of the collaboration, students feel more inclined to learn through every stage of the process and create better output.

How to evaluate individual performance by individuals?

Students may at times feel that their contribution to the assignment may be clouded when everyone receives the same grade. This may seem unfair when specific channels of assessment are incorporated throughout the process of the collaboration. From establishing self-reflective assessment to peer assessment can foster a sense of interdependence.