Exercies to Encourage Online Collaboration

Exercises for Online Collaboration

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It is good educational practice to give online students may different ways to collaborate online BUT

• 1.      There needs to be a balance. If you have too many different types of activities then students get confused. If every exercise is the same then students may get bored.
• 2.      Present day situations can be the starting point for discussions. Often YouTube will have videos that all students can access.
• 3.      Good discussions that use the discussion board have appropriate questions (questions without one answer), clear expectations (a good rubric) and are monitored by the instructor who participates when appropriate.
• 4.      Case studies are great, but I am cautious about students using general knowledge and not applying concepts from the text. I require students to cite the text with page number. You do not want it to turn into “story telling” – is my experience worse than yours? (If students have an eBook there may be no page numbers, but they can cite the section number.)
• 5.      Role playing online? It is difficult, but can be done. I think it is easier in a f2f classroom because the students are in class to present their roles. Online I would think that a GROUP would be assigned a role, which is then presented to the whole. For example, I did a role playing exercise in this series where one group was the patient’s family, one group was the physician. Each of these groups presented their cases to a third group who was the medical ethics board.
• 6.      Online student facilitation. Students can lead the discussion one week and do a summary at the end. 

Blogs, wikis, podcasts are all good additions to online learning. The problem is that teachers mix them up. For example, for group work a wiki is great for the final product but the group also needs a discussion forum for discussions. A blog is good but it is different in form from a discussion.