In Topic 3, the scenario presented for our PBL group discussions was quite familiar to me, unfortunately! Many times I have planned what I thought to be a collaborative activity, but it turned to become a ‘division of labour’, as if my students were workers in a production line, each one doing something specific to contribute to the final product, but losing the sight of the whole product. Usually, in such situations, the students who have had to contribute more, usually covering what some of their colleagues have not done, have reported the feeling of being overloaded and a bit ‘exploited’ by the group. In such cases, learning in a community has definitely not happened! It might have been the case of cooperative work and some members of the group might have adopted an attitude of social loafing.

When I read Brindley, Blaschke and Walti’s (2009) article, I was intrigued (and also relieved) that assessing/grading tasks hasn’t influenced participation in study groups. I was intrigued because I have already noticed more engagement from my students when they knew they would be graded/marked for a certain task. I was relieved because I personally do not like this ‘conditioning’ in the learning and teaching process. This can be related to a utilitarian view of education attuned to its commodification, which may even change and challenge the roles of teachers and students. Instead, the article suggests Siemens’s (2005) connectivism approach to create collaborative learning experiences. This would involve creating bonds amongst  the group participants and also designing tasks that are meaningful and interesting to them. 

I guess I haven’t managed (yet) to successfully create bonds amongst the group of students who adopt a ‘division of labour’ attitude. However, I do remember some tasks I have proposed that were meaningful to my students and, consequently, they have engaged in the activities. One of them was a collaborative musical composition we made online, in which each participant would download the audio file of a colleague and would continue the composition recording his/her own part after listening to his/her colleague’s. S/he would then upload the new file and another person would do the same process of downloading, listening, recording and uploading the audio file.

Reading and watching the resources provided for this topic motivated me to continue trying to create a sense of community and of belonging in group activities. Besides, the roles of the teachers/instructors/facilitators are also key to provide scaffolding to help learners build on previous skills/knowledge, to intervene every time the group needs and to help creating a collaborative environment.

This is what I witnessed in this ONL221 course! Erik and David have shown us in practice how to include participant’s ideas, building up on previous topics and creating a friendly online environment. For this topic, we had Ann-Marie and Fares as moderators, who also helped us discuss the scenario smoothly. Despite the hectic academic time I was having, the group meetings motivated me to continue! I was still substituting my boss so I missed 2 Tuesday-meetings… as a result, ironically, in this topic about collaboration I felt like an ‘intruder’ (see Topic1) and I’m aware I couldn’t collaborate properly with the story of Mrs. Introvert.

The group created a nice story of a teacher (Mrs. Introvert) who had just got a new job in which she had to teach online, having no previous experience in online education. Tuckman’s stages of group development of forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning were used in the story. The stage of adjourning is what we are living now. The course has already finished and it was quite interesting how many of us had reported mixed feelings of sadness (for not having our online meetings) and of relief (for finishing the course), as pointed out in Tuckman’s final stage of group development. Yet, as I will probably blog later (I’m quite late with blogging…), in our final online meeting we arranged to meet again in August/September 2022! I hope this really happens!