Category Archives: Group Work

Student Collaboration and Group Work

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Create opportunities for your students to work with together. Your students can collaborate with each other in pairs, small groups, or as a whole class.

As you consider your options, check with your students about their access to technology. Do they have access to a computer at home or do they only have a mobile device (tablet or mobile phone)? Do they have fast, reliable internet at home or are they on a slower connection or data plan? This information will help you as you plan for which tools and workflows will work best for your course.

myLesley Groups

myLesley Groups provide a private space for students to work together that only they and the instructor can access. Groups may collaborate using group discussions, blogs, wikis, Collaborate sessions, and file exchange. 

Online Collaboration

Create opportunities for your students to work with together. Your students can collaborate with each other in pairs, small groups, or as a whole class.

  • Online documents: Let your students use tools such as Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive to create, edit, share, and collaborate on online documents. Microsoft Office 365 is available to all Lesley University faculty, staff, and students. It includes online versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and many other apps.
  • VoiceThread: Use VoiceThread to create and collaborate on online presentations. Students can have discussions around images or presentations. They can create their own VoiceThread presentations and share them with you or the whole class.

Help and Resources

Online Tutorials

The IT/eLIS Support Site provides resources and tutorials for all Lesley-supported technology, including myLesley, Kaltura Media, VoiceThread, Collaborate Ultra, Microsoft Teams, and more. Not finding what you’re looking for? Put in a support ticket for more information or to set up a training. 

Hoonuit (formerly Atomic Learning) features hundreds of self-paced video tutorials for popular software, online tools, tech integration, and more. Log in to Hoonuit with your myLesley username and password.

Request a Training

Do you have questions or don’t know where to start? Reach out to eLIS and set up an appointment to learn more. eLIS staff are available to meet with you in person in University Hall, online, or on the phone. 

Collaborate and Get Work Done with Office 365 Groups

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Do you have a team project or group assignment? Need to coordinate information and documents with other people? Not always in the same place at the same time?

Office 365 Groups was designed for collaboration. It’s available within Office 365 right alongside your Lesley email, your calendar and OneDrive. Create an Office 365 group and provide your team with a shared email inbox, calendar, space to share documents and a OneNote notebook. It’s a great place to work out project plans, collaborate on documents and make sure everyone is in the loop.

Get started using Office 365 groups by logging into Office 365 at http://lesley.edu/email and watch these Atomic Learning video tutorials for quick how to information.

 

12 Days of Learning: Online Discussion & Collaboration

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Atomic Learning has created the 12 Days of Learning, a series of articles designed to kick off resolutions to keep learning in the new year. We thought this was a great idea and have decided borrow (shamelessly steal) it and do our own. It’s Day 12 and we’re wrapping up our 12 Days of Learning series with online discussion and collaboration. Check in with us tomorrow for a bonus learning day.

Moving your classroom discussion online can pose several unexpected challenges. It can also provide several unexpected benefits. Below is a presentation from two of eLIS’s instructional designers, John McCormick and Sarah Krongard, on how online is different and what to consider when designing one for your course.

View the presentation in another window or click through the slides below.

Groupwork and collaboration online can also present challenges not present in the traditional classroom, but effective collaboration skills are considered critical to being successful in today’s world. This video from the University of New South Wales in Australia offers useful strategies for creating group assignments online and then facilitating and assessing them.

Lync Web for Online Meetings

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Lync Web App is an instant messaging and audio/video chat tool. It’s a great option for online meetings, ad hoc conversations, advising and tutoring. Lync Web includes text-based instant messages, audio and video chat, the ability to share Powerpoint presentations or even your desktop to demo applications or processes. There’s also a whiteboard for quick collaboration and a polling tool for rapid feedback in larger groups.

It’s easy to get started with Lync Web. It runs entirely in your web browser and you only need to install a quick plugin to start your first session. Lync can be accessed using the same login and password as your Lesley email.

Having trouble finding time to meet with your colleagues? Why not schedule your meetings virtually? You can do this directly in Outlook or the Outlook Web App, just as you would any other type of meeting. Select the “Online Meeting” options and a link to the Lync meeting will be included in your invitation. Need to meet with someone who isn’t part of the Lesley community or want to invite a guest to your class discussion? No problem. Include their email address in the meeting invite and they will receive guest access to the online meeting. Note: Guests have slightly fewer privileges for presenting, but will be able to fully participate in the discussion and access the whiteboard.

Lync allows you to participate in online meetings in a variety of ways. There is a desktop client for both Windows and Mac and mobile clients for Windows, Android and iOS so you can even stay connected when you aren’t at your desk.

You can find more information on how to get started with Lync at support.lesley.edu.

Not sure if Lync is right for you and want to consider other options? Check out the Comparison of Online Meeting Tools for a quick overview.

The Journey to Expert Performance: Authentic eLearning Assignments

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How can we best support learners in their ability to apply knowledge and skills to complex situations? Moving away from abstract, decontextualized learning that leads to inert knowledge is difficult to transfer to problem-solving situations. A key element that can move learners to a higher level of expertise is a cognitively authentic task. Collaboratively working on complex, authentic tasks can be a key to students’ successful transfer of knowledge and skills to real world contexts.

Cognitive Apprenticeship

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Collins, Brown and Newman (1989) suggested an extension of the traditional apprenticeship model of learning through what they termed the “Cognitive Apprenticeship”. They claimed that traditional apprenticeships have three elements cognitively important for a model of learning:

  1. Leaners have access to models of expertise-in-use against which to refine their understanding of complex skills.
  2. Apprentices often have several masters and have access to a variety of models of expertise leading to an understanding that there may be different ways to carry out a task, and that no one individual embodies all knowledge and expertise.
  3. Learners have the opportunity to observe other learners with varying degrees of skill (p.456)

Authentic e-Learning

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More recently, Herrington, Reeves, and Oliver (2010) have developed a framework based on the idea of cognitive apprenticeship. The elements of the framework can be used as a set of criteria for designing learning experiences:

  1. Provide authentic contexts that reflect the way the knowledge will be used in real life
  2. Provide authentic tasks
  3. Provide access to expert performances and the modeling of processes
  4. Provide multiple roles and perspectives
  5. Support collaborative construction of knowledge
  6. Promote reflection to enable abstractions to be formed
  7. Promote articulation to enable tacit knowledge to be made explicit
  8. Provide coaching and scaffolding by the teacher at critical times
  9. Provide for authentic assessment of learning within the tasks

Authentic learning is very well suited to online learning, but while students may be familiar with technologies of participatory culture, they need guidance in working on collaborative online teams and coaching at critical times during problem-solving.

If you are interested in creating an authentic online or blended task for your online, hybrid or face-to-face teaching, please feel free to contact elis@lesley.edu. Our design staff has expertise in the creation of collaborative online learning and have presented at national conferences on the topic.