Examples of collaborative learning in context
We (Lindsay and Lynn) were stoked to be invited to this conversation, to chat about our work and hear from the other guests. The conversation covers a lot of contextual and implementation ground: you'll hear about hands-on group projects, online collaboration, and highly structured in-class work. We recommend listening because everyone's teaching context is different, and hearing one instructor walk through their process can help you cement your own or ask yourself important questions. Listeners might especially appreciate Prabhani Kuruppumullage's comments about groupwork in the context of asynchronous learning, where students are choosing to learn online for scheduling flexibility around their other life obligations.
"There's no perfect way to configure student groups, and that just circles back to those big contextual challenges, or situational factors that we have when we're designing our classes. I remember Prabhani mentioning students in different time zones. How do you have students work in groups when they're in different time zones? Maybe you want to group your students based on time zone or help them get together based on their availability. This happened to me when I was teaching a course with a lot of student athletes where they had really restricted free time. And so those kinds of things are ways that we can imagine configuring student groups... prioritizing those biggest issues that are going to have be hurdles for students in our teaching... as much as we can lower the logistical barriers to helping them do that hard work of working together,
"I use a mix of individual and collective assessments. Because, in my the way that I look at it is the group project is there to sort of facilitate student interactions and to improve individual understanding. Because...in statistics classes, specifically, we have students coming from very diverse backgrounds, and because they might also be taking different types of statistics classes when they're actually coming towards the capstone class. So the group project would require them to interact with each other and maybe perhaps even teach each other some of the things... If you just use individual assessments, I think that would discourage people from interacting. But on the other hand, if you only have collective assessments, then that could be somewhat unfair to stronger students. So I think a mix would be the way to go. "