COLLABORATIVE LEARNING:

• Funded Projects: Effective Teaching Using Collaborative Learning Strategies 2005-2006, Faculty of Community Services
  Faculty of Community Services projects funded by Strategic Investment, including creation of web-based communication technology, conflict managment, EduBlogging, and a group contract comparison study.
  
• Other Collaborative Learning Practices from Ryerson Community and Beyond
  Collaborative learning activities conducted by other Ryerson faculty and other universities, including stories, findings, outcomes, lessons learned, and sample of instruments.
  
• Services Available at Ryerson University for Collaborative Learning
  Workshop and seminars offered by the LTO for faculty and Successful Learning Groups organized by the Learning Success Centre for students.
  
• Selected Resources for Faculty and Students Related to Collaborative Learning
  Selected resources, including guidelines, toolkits, strategies, tips, and frequently asked questions with possible solutions on a variety of issues in collaborative learning.

Funded Projects: Effective Teaching Using Collaborative Learning Strategies 2005-2006
Faculty of Community Services Initiatives

BACKGROUND AND HISTORY

Collaborative learning strategies are increasingly used to encourage active participation by students, particularly in large classes where issues such as engagement of students and management of faculty workload are of greatest concern. Faculties from almost every program in the Ryerson University are involved in the challenging task of effectively designing, facilitating and evaluating group projects. To increase the quality of these learning activities in our current environment, new methods and strategies are being used to transform how students learn, including the introduction of educational technology and online collaborative work spaces.

The Faculty of Community Services received approximately $50,000 in Strategic Investment funding in 2005-2006 to explore effective teaching using collaborative learning activities (student group work) with our students. These activities are generally used to encourage active participation, particularly in large classes where issues such as engagement of learners and management of faculty workload are of greatest concern.

Project Goals:

1. Further develop expertise in use of collaborative learning strategies (group work) to enhance Ryerson capacity for excellence in teaching and in technology integration in one or more selected programs.
2. Disseminate of this understanding in the form of best practices for use of collaborative learning strategies across the university.
3. Build a community of learners for curricular transformation (administration, faculty, instructional design, pedagogical expertise, technological expertise, research assistant).
4. Incorporate of evaluation of the effect of curricular innovation on student learning.

Faculty coaches take a leadership role on a range of the following curriculum re-engineering projects, exploring curricular enhancement and implementation of experiential, problem and project-based approaches to create active learning environments. At the same time, best practices will be identified to address concerns such as academic integrity, process modeling, mediation of group conflict, and evaluation strategies that promote achievement of expected learning outcomes.

Following the completion of the funding, several projects are still ongoing. The Strategic Investment funding was provided to initiate the project but not completion. Faculty Coaches will receive an honoraria in recognition of their contribution.

PROJECT UPDATES

Creation of Web-based Communication Technology for School of Nutrition
Faculty Team: Judy Paisley, Sharon Wong, Jacqui Gingras - School of Nutrition, Ryerson University
Student Team: Students in FNP500 course
DMP Coordinators: Matt Justice, Alex Lee
Technologies Used: Collage Content Management System (content update, version control, workflow management, and messaging); Breeze (web conferencing)

To meet students’ applied education needs, Judy Paisley, Sharon Wong and Jacqui Gingras are developing a web-based communications infrastructure to deliver online interactive newsletter. This infrastructure provides students with opportunities to collaborate each other and with faculty members and community-based experts for the ongoing content development, including research, composition, and critical analysis of nutrition communications tailored for audience interested in understanding links between nutrition physical activity and cancer risk. The problem-based learning formation will help students identify and understand complex nutrition issues and problems and construct solutions enabling them to compose and edit high quality, credible nutrition communications (such as feature stories, in-depth analyses of recent research findings, answers to food and nutrition questions posed by users of the website, etc).

Students will also work together to critically appraise each others’ work and provide both editorial and constructive feedback aimed at improving their skills in writing for dissemination to a broad and diverse audience through electronic media. The problem based learning format will foster a collaborative, collegial environment while enhancing students' confidence, capacity and professionalism. Students will engage in ongoing media scans related to relevant nutrition issues, apply and further develop their skills in critical appraisal of research methodologies and statistics, work together to critically analyze the scientific foundation of media stories, and compose communiqués on these topics for the target audience. To keep high quality of the content, students’ writing will be reviewed and approved by faculty or experts before put online.

In this project, faculty, students in FNP500 course and the DMP coordinators are collaborating to design the website and develop the website policies and procedures. The technology to be used has been chosen. The design of functional aspects of the website is currently being developed and will be tested during summer 2007. The deployment of website for testing among target users will be conducted in fall 2007. Students will learn how to use the web content management system and how to manage the ongoing issues related to the website.

Once the project finishes, the link to the website will be provided.

Conflict Management
Sharon Paton - School of Nursing, Ryerson University

Sharon Paton is creating a Learning Object related to the topic of conflict management, a topic that is particularly relevant for students who are working on collaborative learning projects. This is an interactive simulation that students can use to practice conflict/leadership skills, initially reviewing the content individually, then progressing through the exercise as a group. The Learning Object has been designed with the idea that it is transferable to other faculties as conflict management is an issue in all professions. The primary idea is to help other faculty members design the content for their own needs and to assist them in developing the theory component of the particular simulation. The objective is to provide faculty and students with a visually interesting and informative tool to enhance learning, within a safe environment. The dissemination will occur through introduction of the tool through a presentation to interested faculties who would like to implement similar learning activities and through a presentation at the Ryerson Faculty Conference.

EduBlogging: Critical Reflective Narrative Learning Tools and Developing Pedagogically Appropriate Blogging Environments
Jason Nolan - School of Early Childhood Education, Ryerson University
[Click here for the full project summary with bibliography on this topic]

Jason Nolan is experimenting in the area of reflective online narrative tools (blogs) that he has been using for a number of years. In 2005, work began on EduBlogger, a project to create a blogging platform that meets higher education’s needs, by providing avenues for students to become engaged with course work, foster collaboration
and the co-construction of knowledge, and increase the quality of writing.

At Ryerson University’s School of Early Childhood Education, the approach is to engage the notion of teacher professionalization, and develop critical reflective narrative skills. Students are encouraged to situate their discourse and writing as 'public utterances', seeing themselves as not just personal meaning makers, but as working towards maintaining a public professional voice as educators. The impact that this approach has centred on notions of public and private voice, the need for the instructor to be able to make personal comments to students that do not become part of the public record, and a need for the student to be able to have some control over the context into which her ideas are constructed.

The inquiry is action research in nature, completing cycles of implementation in classroom and online settings. Jason and his colleagues have experimented with a variety of platforms, pedagogical techniques and learning settings in order to get a more complete sense of what elements would be required for a full-fledged tool to
meet the needs of educators and learners. They consult with faculty and students from multiple disciplines about their experiences using blogging in a classroom context. The larger project will include formal evaluative protocols including the evaluation of student experience of engagement by means of questionnaires and interviews, and involves collaboration with an extension of the original Edublogger design being developed by Rochelle Mazar at UTM.

The results of the implementation, design and deployment will be useful to researchers and educators interested in large scale courseware initiatives as well as the application and relocalization of existing technologies into learning environments. Jason and his colleagues anticipate the efficacy of evaluation tools, as an adjunct to more traditional methods of evaluation will result in greater efficiency in terms of the evaluative process... [Click here for the full project summary with bibliography on this topic]

A Group Contract Comparison Study
Sussana Edwards - School of Nursing, Ryerson University

Group projects can create a dynamic synergy that fosters deep learning for students. Group work may however, also generate conflict and become a stressful experience for students. A group contract is a strategy that may assist students with group assignments. Students complete the contract at the beginning of their assignment, specifying the group’s goals, tasks, and conflict resolution strategies.

When each student receives the same grade for the group assignment, some students may not do their fair share. Social psychology literature refers to these students as “social loafers” and recommends changing the grading format to reflect individual accountability.

Anecdotal evidence provided by students during class assignments indicates that they would prefer to assign differential grades for group work, however, providing feedback to each other is stressful and they therefore default to giving each other the same grade.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Survey of Literature on Use of Learning and Project Teams in the Classroom [pdf]
Susan FitzRandolph, Genevieve Farrell - School of Business, Ryerson University
This literature review prepared for the Advisory Committee on Teaching and Learning by outlines key issues and strategies for improving group processes in each stage of group development.
[Download Literature Review - 401kb, pdf]