Things to consider when first using collaborative eLearning tools.

Last term, after 12 and a half years in one College, I changed schools. It's amazing the amount of knowledge which you develop about how a place operates. It is also amazing that you don't realise this until you leave, and you have to learn it all again.

Another aspect of changing school is the change in the classroom culture. At my previous school, I had taught my senior students for many years. Subsequently, my pedagogy and methods were familiar to them. They knew how to operate in my classrooms. Changing schools has meant that, in many ways, I have to start that all again. Hence the title to this post.

Last term I launched into an on-line collaboration activity with a class which has never collaborated on-line before. It resulted in one of those classes where you reflect and think "...well that could have gone better". It reminded me of what needs to be considered when introducing a class to on-line collaboration. These considerations follow.

Allow for the "look at me" factor

Whenever you first start on-line collaboration, I can guarantee that students will post silly messages just because they can. They will make comments to their friends, or post a silly picture, word, video etc. I call this the "look at me" factor. 

How you choose to address this is up to you, but have a plan in place before hand. A couple of points from experience:

1. It will stop as soon as the novelty wears off. By the third time you use on-line collaboration it really isn't an issue any more.
2. Making a big issue out of this and drawing more attention to it just fans the flames.

My approach is to let it run it's natural course for couple of minutes. Then, once it starts to settle down, announce something like "Ok guys. We've had our fun, got that out of our systems. Now it's time to get into the work". 

The most important consideration is to allow for this time in your lesson planning.

Create mid-size groups

A whole class collaborating on the same piece of work is very powerful, but you need to take students there slowly. Starting with groups, for example 4-5 students, allows the space for students to develop effective collaboration habits.

In addition, smaller groups limit the impact of the "look at me" factor. They also allow you to more effectively monitor each student's contribution.

Establish roles

When students first collaborate on-line, it is easy for some students to take over, and other students to sit back, or get lost. Providing each student with a particular role helps each student to find their place in the collaboration. For example, in a class where students where looking for cultural memes in media, allocate each student different media.

This demonstrates the power of collaboration: allowing the group to cover more ground then each student individually. Eventually, students will learn to divide the task up themselves.

Set clear goals

If the process of on-line collaboration is new and a little confusing to students, then you need to make everything else really clear. Set out the clear objective of the task, what the groups is expected to achieve, and how they can do this.

Normally, my initial collaboration tasks with a class involve groups working from a template document which I have created. This provides clear scaffolding for the task. The scaffolding can be an outline, or a graphical organiser, or even a table. The important thing is that students know where to add their input.

Allocate writing locations

If you are using a collaborative tools where everyone is accessing the exact same space (eg. Google Apps, Office 365 or Titan Pad), then, initially, it is important allocate where each student can write. Either by using templates, or tables etc. This prevents students from writing over each other.

Use chat and comments

Many on-line collaborative tools have chat or comment features. These are great for when a student disagree with another student's contribution. If your tool has these features, then I suggest that you establish the rule "Do not edit any other student's work". If there is a disagreement or a point of contention, then use comments or chat to come to a resolution. Then the contributing student can make the edit.

Postpone formatting

Some tools will allow formatting. Often, when classes first start on-line collaborating, time is wasted as students continuously change text types and colours. This is frustrating, as you want the students to focus on the content. Never-the-less, a certain percentage of students are concerned about the aesthetics of the document

I have found the best way to address this is to explicitly allocate time at the end to format the document and inform students as such. An extension of this is to get each student to make a copy of the final document and then do their own formatting.

Conclusion

I hope these tips make your class' first adventures in on-line cooperation run smoothly. I know I'll be using them the next time I use on-line cooperation in my class.