For the third topic my PBL group focused on group work and “How to motivate students to work/ collaborate in online teams”. It is an interesting question, group work is something that is common in educations, but maybe not something students (or teachers) love. As a designer you work very much collaborative, so the students benefits a lot from being used to different kind of group settings. We worked with a mind map trying to figure out what is most important. We used “The Project Excellence Model” (The Project Excellence Baseline, International Project Management Association (IPMA), 2016, https://www.ipma-usa.org/standards/the-ipma-project-excellence-baseline) when we identified the different steps in a collaborative work; people and purpose, process, result and feedback. That gave us a good overview. The biggest insight was that planning is, as usual, a key to success. Also it is essential that all involved understand why we are doing the group work and “what´s in it” for the individual student. It is also important to get the online situation to work with for example tools for collaborative work, that all involved understand and find satisfying to use.

Planning in the teaching teams I work in have been more difficult to do since we started do online teaching. The hard part is not to put up a planning meeting, make schedule and divide the work, the hard part have been to come up with great ideas. I think often to be able to get control over the situation we have divided the work between the colleagues instead of collaborated. This is exactly what we not want the students to do. In a well working group work, it is in the collaboration the interesting and developing things happen.

I miss the fika breaks! The way work have turned out I have felt quit lonely the past 1,5 years. I have met students and colleagues in courses, but I miss the informal meetings on a coffee or lunch break or in the corridors, when working from home. I miss the chit-chat when everything and nothing could happen. We have tried some zoom-fika, but it did not really work, too much planning and sending links, not very informal and only the invited persons could participate. I think many great ideas comes out of serendipity, but how does that happen when we work alone and have to provide ourselves with all our impressions? This is something I need to think of, how to get the social informality into my online working life?