Group-based projects

Group-based practices

This section owes a great deal to Jen Tarr (University of South Carolina), nearly everything I know about teaching with kindness and compassion (and still guiding students to make solid work), I owe to her. We spoke for a while about ways to adapt group-based projects, especially the difficulties in facilitating semester-long projects. Below are the recommendations that we discussed together, made more general to apply across disciplines.

In general these adaptations will largely depend on the level of student engagement and excitement about the idea. These adaptations will also depend on the learning objectives of the class. If collaboration is listed as a learning objective, then you will need to find a way for them to still collaborate.

Collaboration is not a learning objective:

• Scaleback to Solo Only

  • If collaboration is not essential to your course objectives, but an important value for you as a teacher, then that might be something to talk to your students about and get their opinion on, and see what they prefer/want.

  • You could allow students to self-select if they want to be in a group or do the project separately in this case as well.

Collaboration is a learning objective:

• Traditional Group project

  • Give clear guidelines and strategies for expectations.

  • Allow for lots of creative play with form and format.

  • Make small parts of the projects due throughout the class, and use these as ways to check-in throughout the process. Do not be punitive if late, just be curious.

  • It might be important to be flexible and allow for the projects to become solo if this doesn’t work out. The collaborative learning element will have been achieved in trying.

  • If classmates know one another, I often allow them to self-select groups. If they don't know one another, I sometimes have them take a survey and make their groups myself.

• Synchron-ish Duets/Trios

  • This is probably one of my favourite ideas, as it essentially gives everyone in the class a creative accountability partner for the rest of the semester.

  • The goal here is twofold, to create space to collaborate and also to ward against social isolation.

  • Give clear guidelines and prompts, perhaps even focusing on what is shared between spaces to help bridge the gaps in distance.

• Asynchronous Collaboration

  • I do this in my regular practice, but it is really useful for technical skills as each student gets to do their own individual deep dive into a process, but then they’re able to make a larger work because it’s collaborative.

  • In each of these examples, a single student was responsible for their own individual assets and then as a group determined the editing of those pieces: Example 1 (Animation), Example 2 (Rotoscope), Example 3 (Stop Motion)

  • These techniques could be applied across disciplines, be it developing different parts of choreography of the same dance, an exquisite corpse style drawing or collage, a song composed by each person laying down one track either after (sequential) or above (layered) the other.

• A small solo project, paired with a simple (fun?) collaborative element.

  • This might be the most practical option for accomplishing the collaborative learning objective of your course.

  • Let the solo project handle the bulk of the conceptual skills, and distill a single technical skill that could be learned through a project that can be collaboratively assembled.

  • In order to really emphasize the collaborative element, it’ll be important to incorporate as much discussion and student agency in how the assembly happens, even if you ultimately are the one that puts all the pieces together.

Guidelines for Collaborating Online:

• Use Running Meeting Notes, create Google Docs for your students with their names in them. Demonstrate how to put the most recent meeting notes at the top (to make it easier for you to grade).

  • For example:

    • Meeting 3

    • Meeting 2

    • Meeting 1

• Use Checkin-Ins, to help keep track of student progress

  • Make small parts of the project due

  • Consider holding “conferences” with groups to see how everything is going.

• Create Collaborative Doc/Slides/Jamboard for students to brainstorm

• Give activities and prompts that will facilitate them to talk to one another about what they’re making.

• Incorporate work-in-progress style critiques when possible.

VPN - RamsVPN

• There are some online university resources that require use of the RamsVPN, before they can be accessed from off campus. Documentation is here on how to get setup: https://docs.google.com/document/u/2/d/1yBVeClUuRBkclLeR5RnqGj0nVfiOL2i_uocUqSCnPQc