COLLABORATIVE LEARNING:
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Funded Projects: Effective Teaching Using Collaborative Learning Strategies 2005-2006 |
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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.
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 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
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 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 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]
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. To understand this issue, Sussana is conducting a two-year study that compares the contracts of two different nursing courses that have a group assignment due in the winter semester. In one course, the contract mandates that the students receive the same mark for the group assignment and in the other, the contract allows the students to assign different grades to each student based upon task completion and group participation. Study results will be available April 2008. |
LITERATURE REVIEW |
Survey of Literature on Use of Learning and Project Teams in the Classroom [pdf] |