So the next step in my journey on collaborative learning has been on the topic of learning in communities – networked and collaborative. When I reflect on my best experience of collaborative learning, it’s when I previously worked within business development in an international corporation. I had the opportunity to participate a few times in working groups where we used a business transformation consultant. His role was to facilitate our work and nudge us in the right direction, often asking questions. We never felt that he was interfering with our work or taking over, but we knew that we would not have managed the same quality and level of work without him. Every time we were amazed at the work we had done and that feeling of accomplishing something that none of us could have done independently. I was the WOW of collaborative learning. During my years working in the private industrial sector, I also had mentors, experienced senior executives that I met and talked with regularly. During a period, I also used a professional development coach.
Personal Learning Network
Now that I’m in this new profession and my role in teaching, I don’t have the same personal learning network. My personal learning network today consists mainly of various sources that I use to grow my knowledge. This last year I’ve participated in webinars, online conferences on multiple topics related to higher education and teaching maybe two to three times a month. I’m also in a national Facebook group about online teaching in higher education. It has over 4000 members and provides almost instant support, and a fantastic source of knowledge. I’ve also found some interesting resources on LinkedIn and Twitter. I recently added some resources related to open education. With the technology, my learning network is not limited to the colleagues that I have locally, but I can so easily take part in events all over the world. Not only can I find what I’m looking for, but the most interesting is that I find things I didn’t even know existed. Some of that has changed the way I think about teaching, and it has improved my practice. This last year has been so full of golden nuggets on online education. I’ve incorporated some of them into my courses. There are so many more things that I want to explore, try and test.
Feelings of frustration
Another topic we have explored is online group work. One paper reported findings from a study on factors that students found frustrating in online collaborative learning (Capdeferro and Romero, 2012). The number one source of frustrations was commitment imbalance followed by unshared goals. These are the most common arguments that I’ve met among students when they don’t get to pick their group. These complaints are mostly from students who feel that other student work is of a significantly lower quality than their own. The study, by the way, had the majority of students 57,5 % reporting rarely or very rarely feeling frustrated (Capdeferro and Romero, 2012). One golden nugget I take with me is to have group work followed by an individual assignment (Brindley, Blaschke and Walti, 2009). That way, the ambitious student can have the opportunity to excel but is simultaneously dependent on the group work. That will also support me as I need to set individual grades in group work.
I made it – just in time
I have also experienced some level of frustration the last week because there was a lot of reading and one paper I could not make any sense of it. But my frustration was really with my poor time management and inability to understand, not the group. The other participants on the course are a great source of insightful comments and brilliant suggestions on interesting reading.
References:
Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. and Walti, C. (2009) ‘Creating Effective Collaborative Learning Groups in an Online Environment’, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(3). doi: 10.19173/irrodl.v10i3.675.
Capdeferro, N. and Romero, M. (2012) ‘Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?’, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(2), p. 26. doi: 10.19173/irrodl.v13i2.1127.