Week 1: Overview

Collaboration

Collaboration is an important topic - in the workplace and within educational institutions. Faculty have different levels of experience and knowledge in designing collaborative activities, in helping students have successful collaborative learning experiences, in ensuring fairness in evaluation and marking, and to find ways to guide students to acknowledge and deal positively with conflict situations.

Resources (FLO):

• Collaborative Online Research and Learning, "Tuckman Stages of Group Development", retrieved from http://coral.wcupa.edu/tuckmanstages.htm 
• MIT, Human Resources, Learning & Development, "Using the Stages of Team Development", retrieved from http://hrweb.mit.edu/learning-development/learning-topics/teams/articles/stages-development
• Dool, R. (2007, February). Best practices: Mitigating Conflict in Online Student Teams. eLearn Magazine, 2007(2), 2. Retrieved from http://elearnmag.acm.org/archive.cfm?aid=1229760
  Note: This article directly addresses the issue of conflict in teams. It gives effective, solid strategies based on experience.
• Lam, W., Chua, A., Williams, J.B., & Lee, C. (2005). Virtual teams: Surviving or thriving? Proceedings of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education Annual Conference, Brisbane, Australia (pp. 357-360). Retrieved from http://www.ascilite.org/conferences/brisbane05/blogs/proceedings/41_Lam.pdf
  Note: This article is written by faculty who have a strong focus on team work that contributes to as much as 50% of student grades. Some good strategy suggestions for helping teams perform well together.
• RRU - CTET. (2008, Fall). Team Based Learning. Tools for Teaching (T4T) Tipsheet, 1(3), 1-2. Retrieved from http://ctet.royalroads.ca/sites/default/files/pages/tbl-t4t_2014.pdf
  Note: This tip sheet is a short and sweet strategy document.
• University of New South Wales, Learning to Teach Online -  From COFA.online Gateway - Learning to Teach Online project
• Video (5:40)