Another fortnight, another topic 🙂
This time we try to examine (true) collaboration in groups. I write true because as others have mentioned in their reflections and also became apparent as a common experience in our group discussion, we and often our students mix cooperation with collaboration.
We have been engrained throughout all our student and professional lifes in a specific mode of working together as in ‘’sharing the tasks and combine in the end’’ which I believe originated from a place of ‘’being time efficient’’ as well as lack of online capabilities in the past that it is now difficult to move away from, although we live in an era that we can easily meet online with others with no real effort. The time constraint is still there though and I believe it is one of the main drivers why we still like to work as before. Especially in a world where things move so fast and everyone wants and likes a quick outcome.
Trying to bring this all together in my discipline which is engineering and more specifically materials engineering adds another challenge since most of our courses involve some kind of group work that is happening either during or after a laboratory exercise. The students and often we (the teachers) view this as a rather linear process: Sample preparation, then characterization of the material and finally data analysis. This naturally encourages “task-splitting”.
I would like to use some online tools to help students get away from this traditional practice so they actually don’t need to spend the time traveling to university and physically meet. Instead I would like to promote some synchronous data interpretation using some online tool such as miro (we used that in our group for this topic 😛) to analyze and discuss for instance microscopy images in real-time and then decide on their discussion part for the report together.
Another thing (I am already doing in one course) is that before the final submission each group has to peer review another group’s report and give feedback. This can actually take the form of an online seminar where the discussion happens in real time instead of just sending back some written comments as we are doing now.
All this creates of course some extra effort from the teachers and also students. As we discussed in our group, the benefits of working like this should be clearly explained to the students so they don’t feel like doing extra work for nothing. It’s a complex problem to introduce new ways of working in traditional fields that requires some balancing between time management and digital tools/AI as well as helping students understand this shift.
Kirsty Dunnett
I work quite a bit with introductory (first year) physics labs and one thing I’ve concluded in taking this course (although also influenced by someone recounting an awful incident of selfish unhelpfulness the UK) is that if we want to promote collaboration or team work skills in lab tasks, the tasks need to be impossible to complete without several pairs of hands (and eyes). Obviously this becomes a little tricky if one doesn’t know how many students will be in each group, but one can have a minimum group size of e.g., 3, below which the task will be really difficult, and one or two extra pairs will make things easier, but will be fully occupied. True, one gets a certain amount of task splitting within that, but it quickly becomes clear that everyone contributes to completing the task.
The other conclusion I’ve come to is that notes should be shared with everyone being able to easily add: online notebooks documents or notebooks are not very flexible, but are easy for all to add to – so long as everyone has a computer, but we’ve also found that getting students to record data and related observations (and optionally full notes) on large whiteboards (at least 2 available per group) can work quite well, and so long as plenty of whiteboard markers are available, one doesn’t really have the problem of not having a computer – or having to borrow someone else’s.
I really like your example of peer-reviewing lab reports – that’s a really good learning opportunity.