Interaction: Tools for Collaboration
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A workshop on designing interaction activities into your online and hybrid courses using BlackBoard and other technology tools including WebEx, Google Hangouts, and Trello. Focuses on Standards 3, 5, and 6 from Quality Matters.
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Interaction: Tools for Collaboration
- 2. Use the Quality Matters rubric and Standards 5 and 6 to help guide your course development Develop opportunities aligned with course objectives for students to engage in class – online or off Use tools to promote both synchronous and asynchronous interaction in your classroom
- 3. As with other standards, QM stresses alignment of interaction and technology tools to course objectives Always keep objectives in mind and use them as guidance when developing activities or choosing technologies Good objective verbs for promoting interaction: Discuss Present Analyze Solve Design Compare and Contrast Critique Argue
- 4. Group projects can sometimes become headaches for both students and instructors While there are benefits, there are often challenges in coordination and getting students to truly collaborate
- 5. Try activities that promote collaboration, but still result in an individual grade Provide groups a chance to work during class time (or incentivize online participation) Teach AND assess team process skills as part of the activity Assign roles to each group member to create structure For more: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/des ign/instructionalstrategies/groupprojects/challe nges.html
- 6. In your requirements, ask students to provide feedback and hold each other accountable.Try the following prompt: Everyone on your team is expected to contribute.The purpose of peer review is to provide effective feedback. Take time to conduct a peer review and submit a completed form for each of your team members. Also, take a moment for a self-evaluation as well and submit the evaluations to your supervisor. Please be honest on the evaluations on yourself and your peers. Please post an evaluation for each team member, and one for yourself.
- 8. In an online class, groupwork gets a little more complicated Individual responsibilities and assessment is even more important Considering offering both synchronous and asynchronous options for working together Synchronous tools: WebEx, Google Hangouts, Skype, Facebook chat, phone/text Asynchronous tools: Discussion boards, wikis,Trello.com, email, Facebook groups
- 9. All users with a Purdue account have access (including students) Visit http://purdue.webex.com to log in Webcam and microphone needed Start a conference – five types: Personal room: always available from the start page Meeting: For interactive presentations of a general nature Event: For scheduled online events and webinars Training:To administer online tests or quizzes, and conduct lab sessions or virtual office hours Support: For helping others work through technological issues by sharing screens
- 10. Meetings and the personal conference room are the most popular and common way to set up a conference Simple, easy to get started at any time One student can share the link to others to connect Meetings can be recorded for later viewing (or to share with instructors who want records!)
- 11. All published recordings go to the Kaltura MediaSpace: http://mediaspace.itap.purdue.edu You may log in at the MediaSpace website to access links to all recordings You may also access recordings in BlackBoard through the Build Content -> Kaltura command There is a lag time between recording and accessing the finished recorded link, which can be several hours depending on length
- 12. Google Hangout is a free alternative to Adobe Connect if your students need a meeting room or a tool for collaboration http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/ Available on: Windows Mac Tablets (iOS & Android) Mobile Devices (iOS & Android)
- 13. Facebook can be a great way to get people together Can be used synchronously or asynchronously You can create groups or encourage students to create them on their own Creates a more informal, fun space for discussion
- 14. Classic, simple threaded discussion forum Perfect for asynchronous debate, brainstorming, and peer review Create threads (messages) then reply to start conversation Forums can be graded by points or rubrics Subscribe to forums to receive message notifications in email
- 16. BlackBoard has some basic group tools including self- signup, group discussions, and group assignments GroupTools can be a little difficult for students to understand at first, but can be useful See http://help.blackboard.co m/en- us/Learn/9.1_2014_04/Instr uctor/080_Collaboration/0 50_Course_Groups
- 17. Trello.com Answergarden.com MindMeister.com Mural.ly FlockDraw AWWApp.com More at http://www.creativebloq. com/design/online- collaboration-tools- 912855
- 18. Reach us at: pncolt@pnc.edu Twitter and Facebook: @PNCOLT http://www.pnc.edu/distance for all workshop notes, links, and training needs
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to Interaction, the last part of our series and one that will help you get the most out of interacting with your students, and helping them interact with one another.
- The QM Rubric in standards 5 and 6 look at interaction closely, as well as the tools that support it. Our goal today is to develop opportunities that are aligned with course objectives that let students learn more from one another. Whether you do this in teams, in dyads, or as a whole class, group interaction can be just as rich – if not more so – in the virtual space as it can be in the face-to-face classroom. The trick is setting everything up to make that interaction possible and accessible.
- Interaction can be a funny thing, in that it looks different depending on the course topic, objectives, and teaching approach. In some classes, there is minimal interaction between students, and that is perfectly appropriate. In others, most of the class could be based on group interaction. So, do not feel pressured to include activities outside of what makes sense for you and your course objectives, but also do not discount group activities simply because you haven’t done much with them in the past. You might find that a few good discussions or group projects could add a lot of life to your course! If you use some of the action verbs in your objectives as shown, you might definitely consider ways to engage students in debates, presentations, sharing, and even mock trials and interviews. And yes, all of this stuff can be done well online!
- Group projects, as many of us already know, come with their share of headaches and problems. For many teachers, they have considered that group projects could be very valuable, but have balked at the implementation because of the inherent problems of groups that do not work together well, students that take on all of the work or don’t do enough, and others that make it difficult for the rest of the group to be successful because of difficult schedules or poor communication. I personally have been reluctant to do many group projects after a few failed attempts early on. But, there are benefits to making students work together, particularly in disciplines where they would do so a great deal in the professional world, such as in business or engineering.
- I have found that activities that promote collaboration but still result in an individual grade can provide the best of both worlds. When students are still responsible for their own work and not wholly reliant on one another, those problematic group members are no longer as large of a concern. They are only “hurting themselves” in such a scenario. Another strategy with group work is to provide time to work together as a group. In class, this is easier, but online, you may need to incentivize group work by encouraging students to get together through WebEx or another online tool, and assign grades for this participation. In this way, it is more likely that students will do the work and get the benefits of collaborating. Teaching and assessing team skills as part of this activity is also very useful, by including the assessment in the project rubric. In this way, students will be given the expectation of collaboration and group process required of them, and they will receive grades based at least in part on that expectation. Group skills in this way are no different from the other skills that they may be taking away from the project. For more ideas, check out the provided link, which gives some excellent ideas and strategies for working with groups and their challenges.
- Asking students to provide feedback on one another’s performance in a group situation is also a useful idea, as they can hold each other more accountable. You may find that students are often harder on each other than you might be! The prompt above is taken from a colleague who did frequent group work in her computer programming classes, and at the end of each project she required that they complete a self-evaluation of their team members as a major part of their grade in the course. This allowed her to see where there might have been problems and also allowed her to verify any concerns that she suspected while they were working in their groups.
- This table shows the rest of the evaluation sheet that my colleague provided to students, including each evaluation area. It asks students to rate each other on understanding the work specifications, that they worked collaboratively, that their accepted responsibilities for tasks, that they demonstrated effective time management, that they applied logical and procedural thinking skills, that they understood the deliverables for the project, and that they worked to develop those deliverables equally and with good time management.
- Collaborating on the Web indeed is a little more complicated than in the face-to-face setting. In online and hybrid classes, setting individual expectations in group work and ensuring that there is adequate assessment of group skills is even more important, as your expectations set the stage for the project even more online. There is much less flexibility to change things up or apply different criteria in the middle of a project when working online. With this in mind, try using technology to your advantage and provide students with multiple opportunities for synchronous and asynchronous communication. Some favorite sites that are free and easy to access for students include WebEx, Google Hangouts, Skype, Facebook, Discussion forums in BlackBoard, email, and Trello.com, a free project management tool for group work.
- To enter the WebEx interface, log in with your career account username and password at http://purdue.webex.com. You will be asked the first time you log in to set your time zone preferences, and you will then be presented with the main WebEx menu interface. From here, you can enter a conference if you know the conference ID code, or you can schedule or start any of the following types of online conferences: Meeting: For interactive presentations of a general nature – this is the most common type of meeting and what many faculty will typically choose Event: For scheduled online events and webinars Training: To administer online tests or quizzes, and conduct lab sessions or virtual office hours Support: For helping others work through technological issues by sharing screens Many instructors may wish to set up meetings, events, trainings, or support sessions depending on the type of conference they are planning. Scheduling for all types of events provide options for password protection, session recording, setting specific start and end times, and sending the meeting URL out to participants at any time to notify them to attend the session. All types of sessions except Events also have “instant” or “one-click” versions where you can immediately set up a meeting room and get started; however, once the session is closed out, the online room is no longer available unless you have recorded the session to watch later. For some additional quick getting started hints and guides, visit http://www.webex.com/support/getting-started.html.
- Many instructors may wish to set up meetings, events, trainings, or support sessions depending on the type of conference they are planning. Scheduling for all types of events provide options for password protection, session recording, setting specific start and end times, and sending the meeting URL out to participants at any time to notify them to attend the session. All types of sessions except Events also have “instant” or “one-click” versions where you can immediately set up a meeting room and get started; however, once the session is closed out, the online room is no longer available unless you have recorded the session to watch later. To set up a “perpetual” meeting, or one that you may use throughout the semester, do the following: Log in at http://www.purdue.webex.com and click the Meeting Center tab. Click on schedule a meeting, and then click the Advanced Scheduler link at the top of the screen that comes up. The Advanced Scheduler gives you a number of options, but the one option that helps you ensure that your meeting link will always be available to students is to unclick the Delete from My Meetings when Completed checkbox. You must name your meeting and give it a password, but you may keep the password simple and convey it to students who need it. Under Date and Time, you can also set the meeting to recur at times you specify, making it available as often as you wish to ensure that it will be open to students at any time that you need it. For example, you may wish to have regularly scheduled office hours on certain days and times each week, so you could open the room for those hours, making it available through the same link, every time your office hours time comes up. This link and/or the corresponding meeting ID number will be sent to your email upon clicking the Start button to complete your schedule. This information can be posted in your BlackBoard course or sent out to students in another way to give them access. Click Start or Schedule Meeting when you are ready to begin your meeting. To return to your meeting at any time, click My Meetings to see all of your scheduled sessions. You can also return to the link sent to you in your email as well.
- You may record your sessions in WebEx by clicking the Record tab, and then clicking the red record button. You will know you are recording once the timer starts counting and you see the notification that the session is currently recording. Click the red Stop button to stop recording at any time. Once you complete a recording, your saved files will process initially into the My Recorded Meetings (or My Event Recordings, or my Training Recordings, depending on the type of session chosen) location in WebEx. However, recordings will not stay in this location. After full processing, they will move to your Kaltura MediaSpace at Purdue, which is accessible in two ways. Visit http://mediaspace.itap.purdue.edu and log in with your career account username and password to access your recordings, including get permanent links of recordings to share with others. In BlackBoard, you may click Build Content in any content area and choose Kaltura Media to review your library and add recordings to your course directly. See Add Video with Kaltura (or this Kaltura tutorial video) for help with using Kaltura in BlackBoard. Note that recordings may take up to 24 hours to fully process, but are typically available within two hours of when your recording concludes.
- Google Hangout is a great option for groups of people who all have different devices, and all have Google (Gmail) accounts. Student email accounts at PNC are already Google-based, so they should have no problem logging in to Google Hangouts without the need for new passwords and accounts to be created. Hangouts is also supported on most devices, including computers, tablets, and smartphones. It is similar to Skype in that it offers voice and audio chat combined with simple text chat and some document sharing capabilities.
- Facebook is another great tool that most of your students will already be familiar with. It has both synchronous and asynchronous capabilities, making it very flexible for diverse group interactions. It can also make discussions a little more fun and lively for many students, encouraging them to want to get online for their classwork that much more. Sometimes students even form their own study groups on their own, with no prompting from professors! If you wish to be on Facebook with your students, you can create groups and host them through your own profile, or simply encourage students to work together to create their own groups to chat within. Either way, this tool can serve to make the work of “getting together” much better and easier for many students.
- BlackBoard of course has its own discussion tool, which works very well for asynchronous discussion and debate of all kinds. It is easy to use and consists of creating and replying to “threads” of conversation. Forums can also be tracked and graded directly within the system, providing you with better control over what is going on in your groups. You can subscribe to forums as well to ensure that you get an email notification anytime a new post is made to the forum. This can ensure that you can keep an eye on what is going on, and respond when needed more quickly.
- Grading discussions is as easy as clicking to Grade the forum while viewing a discussion, or clicking on a student’s posting from the Needs Grading tool in your left-hand sidebar. You will be given a view that allows you to review each student’s posts in a single window, and the ability to use your rubric (if available) and assign a grade. See http://help.blackboard.com/en-us/Learn/9.1_2014_04/Instructor/080_Collaboration for more information.
- BlackBoard does incorporate some group tools as well, that can be used to give groups of students their own place to post discussions, participate in assignments, and even share files with one another. Other groups will not be able to access each group’s individual Group area. You can also set up groups to be randomly enrolled, to set them up yourself, or to allow students to self-enroll into a group based on whatever criteria you wish to give.
- Other cool tools that encourage and facilitate group work include Trello.com, Answergarden, MindMeister, Mural.ly, FlockDraw, AWWApp, and much more. Many of these are collaborative drawing tools, or include the ability to share media, drawings, and photos. This can be great for collaborative presentations and other creative products. There is almost no end to what is available to the enterprising teacher and students, so as usual, experiment and try new things to see how it goes. You never know – you might hit upon a real winner with your students! Giving students choices and being flexible about what they are able to use to accomplish course objectives is also a great idea – this way, students figure out what works best for them and take more ownership of their own learning. This also takes the pressure off of you to learn everything about all of these tools, because you definitely don’t need to!
- Please contact us and visit http://pnc.edu/distance for all workshop notes, links, and training needs. Thank you!