[SOUND] Developing effective team work and collaboration skills, are considered important in the student learning process. However, many students find group work challenging, and difficult. In this episode, we examine what constitutes good online team work. And how internet technologies, can help make it more effective. We also offer some strategies, for facilitating collaboration and assessing group work. >> One of the most vexed areas of university education is group work. Students, broadly speaking, don't like it. They are brought up and enter university on a very individually competitive basis. So when they're told to work with their, if you like, competitors in a group, it can be very challenging. >> Showing people the benefits of group work, is, is difficult, but think about what you do in a real life context. When you leave the university and you're working in a, in an office, you do that in groups. You do that in teams. It's an authentic approach to learning, regardless of all the other benefits that it might have. >> So there's a movement at the moment to think about how internet technologies can make group work more effective. Perhaps less time consuming. And maybe a little bit more transparent or, or fairer to the students who are participating in the group. I think the answer to how do you do good teamwork in online learning is actually the same as how do you do it face to face. You design appropriate tasks, you encourage the students to work together. You build assessment strategies that show them the rewards, and you explain to them why teamwork is important. >> What are the types of things these students are going to do in real life with the knowledge they're learning in this course. Try to plan for that type of activity in your course using the online, affordances of the technology. Tone of voice, facial expressions, body language. Obviously they're dramatically diminished in an online context and therefore that presents some communication challenges. >> You really have to work with them online to, to get that personality. You have to learn where those people come from, where they're at and what their abilities, their skills and experiences and how you are going to fit in with them on the team. >> The group needs to bond they talk about intersubjectivity, the idea that I'll give you a bit about me, you give me a bit about you, we've shared something we've become sort of open and vulnerable, and in that, we build trust. By mentoring them and responding to their questions and queries, we'll, we'll, we'll push them towards working with each other in, in, in a more collaborative way. >> We couldn't force students to collaborate but what we did, a strategy we did adopt was to try and sort our groups based on those who were more likely to collaborate. >> What they need, I think, is nurturing through the group building process because it's, it for most of them it's, it's a new experience. One of the, important things is, is to set up front how you're going to assess these sorts of activities. >> There's a tremendous mythology about group work. What about the group member who doesn't do any work? This will bring my marks down. It's not fair. One of the interesting things about some internet technologies that can be used for teamwork, and, and there are many, Wikis, blogs, or specialist programs like Wiggio or Huddle. They leave traces of what individual members have done in a group. >> You might want to have students are saying well as an audit, if you like, this is what I did, and it might be that you want to moderate those marks based on that sort of a feedback. >> What we decided to do was we give a large percentage of the mark to the group, which they all shared, but on top of that, sufficient percentage of a mark to make a difference. And to make a difference sufficient to push them up into the next category, you know, from a past to a credit, a credit to distinction and so on. The more work you do, the more you will be rewarded, and then the pay off for the students is that they are going to benefit because the whole group will also get a mark based on the extra effort that these people have made. Don't feel that it, you know, it's too difficult. It's really worthwhile that you actually get groups working, students working as groups, because it develops their understanding in a social context. >> This is not an optional extra or some way that academics have decided is an easier way to get out of getting out of marking or something like that, it's actually how the real world works and that learning to become a team member and still produce good work is part of being at university. [BLANK_AUDIO]