The Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology is both an annual event and a year-round online discussion of ways that faculty and staff are using technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research.
One of the goals of education is to prepare students with the professional skills to gain employment. To be prepared for employment, skilled teamwork is necessary. Teamwork is also a way to facilitate student-student interactions. Those interactions can be essential to the success of an online learning environment. Through peer interaction and collaboration, students are able to synthesize and evaluate their ideas collectively and are forced to reflect upon and reason about their ideas at greater depth than when working individually.
The focus of this session will be to describe the investigation designed to improve individual learning while effectively collaborating on an online course team project. We collected both qualitative data through the constant comparative method to understand the student experience and inform our development of a framework of team guidance, and quantitative data through pre- and post-testing, to assess team cognition changes and learning. The resulting framework, an innovative three-stage collaboration model for online, asynchronous, and geographically-distributed teaming, will be described.
The session will begin with relevant background and context of this project where particular focus will be on describing the course, experiment, and qualitative and quantitative data. A discussion will follow, encouraging the audience to comment on their experience implementing team projects in an online course.