1. Perceptions of online group work
Vic Nicholas, Nick Braithwaite, Sarah Chyriwsky, Dave Edwards and Mark Hirst

2. Research Questions and methods Initial work Findings Where next?
Outline
Origin and context
Research Questions and methods
Initial work
Findings
Where next?

3. Origin and context: background
This work originated from an eSTEeM project on student perception of online group work at L1 (forum and Elluminate). An unexpected finding was negative comments about group work. “the only problem was having to rely on other people” “people were late” “everyone was being too polite and deadlines got pushed back, it got messy”
SX*288 students had to contribute to an interdisciplinary online project as part of their EMA.
Lots of useful literature about group working online:
Haresnape, Janet (2015). Student perceptions of an assessed, online, collaborative activity. Practitioner Research in Higher Education, 9(1) pp. 18–37.
Robinson, Kathy (2013). The interrelationship of emotion and cognition when students undertake collaborative group work online: an interdisciplinary approach. Computers and Education, 62 pp –307.
Janet’s task fixed and defined - positive outcome. Kathy’s project older and based on First Class – focused on things that inhibited collaborative work.

4. Origin and context: SX*288
SX*288 12B, 13B & 14B
Students on five different themes of SX*288 study in their themes for 26 weeks. For the final 8 weeks they are mixed into new interdisciplinary project groups.
Each team had roles of editor, time keeper etc
Each presentation had a different project
Number of students
Number of teams
Average team size
12B
358 36 10
13B
600 68 9
14B
934
103

5. Origin and Context: Project
Geocardigia: Exploring habitibility
‘’Propose investigations for this imagined scenario’’

6. Origin and context: Team Report
Typical output of final project
Collaborative project output from a single team of 6-10 students.

7. Reflections on their team: EMA questions (25%)
Origin and Context
Reflections on their team: EMA questions (25%)
What were the benefits and drawbacks of working on this problem as a team? Provide evidence of these benefits and drawbacks (200 – 300 words.)
Consider your own learning on this module. As a result of this experience, what advice would you give to anyone considering undertaking a team-working project? (300 – 400 words.)
If you had the opportunity to do the project again with the same people/resources/time what would you do differently and why? (100 – 150 words.)

8. How were the tools we provided for collaborative work used?
Questions
How were the tools we provided for collaborative work used?
Forums, Wikis and OULive (Elluminate)
Do they help or do they hinder ?
Do they use others ? [GoogleDocs, , DoodlePoll]
Student Perceptions
What obstacles do they report ?
Did students see the benefits of team working?
Can we develop common themes for thematic analysis of larger cohorts ?
Given the importance of team working in employability

9. Example of team forum activity
New Discussions: 2483
Replies:
n = 600 students
Teams got a new forum with prompts on various aspects of the team project used to initiate discussion and to provide feedback etc.
Range of individual participation from the very active to the rather inactive (note these students were all considered to have participated..there are other streams such as wiki/report writing and OULive)
Traffic over the period of the team project (end of the module having studied their own specialised strands)
13B Presentation
151 subscribed to their EMA forum (all posts)
37 to between 1-15 specific discussions)
-31.3% subscribe.

10. Initial work and research methods
Random sub-set of 35 SX*288 EMA scripts from 14B were analysed by two ALs with experience on the module (Sarah Chyriwsky and Dave Edwards)
Looked for themes that emerged from the reflection questions and each wrote a report
Vic and Mark read through these reports independently and pulled out common themes
Nvivo analysis on a further 15 EMAs (from all presentations)

11. Findings: Common Themes
‘I think this was one of those instances where the difficulty in communicating became apparent; it’s a lot more difficult trying to figure things out and communicate online than when working in a group who are all in the same room…..’
Communication online
(18/33)

12. Findings: Common Themes
Knowledge of team members
Time management
Sharing workload
Personalities
Communication online
Shared Expertise & Skills
Team greater than its parts
Roles within the team
Team set-up

13. Findings: Similar themes
Kathy Robinson (2013)
35/40 students surveyed used at least one of these terms
Virtual residential school run in psychology programme, teams 4-8 students, all communication via FirstClass.
It is the last grouping: the reflective component that tend sto produce the mor epositive comments…
Autonomy: Things that are beyond their own control, dependence upon other group members’ participation, skills and experience and on the technology
Virtual others: working with team members that you have never met F2F using only e-communications
Communicating online: Impacts on progress and achievement (delays,gaps etc)
Reflections on collaborative work: Expressing their perspective about the value of collaborative learning.

14. Findings: Recognising the Benefits
People bring different strengths (KU, expertise)
Division of labour
Learn about other approaches to science
Learn about other approaches to report writing
Support team members less able to contribute
Motivation to not let the team down
Increased self confidence

15. Upon Reflection: What students say helps…..
Start team work promptly
Project prompts
Participating regularly
Communicating well
Forum threads: short with clear subjects
Posting summaries
Being clear about availability
Elluminate: good for brainstorming and real time discussions
good for prompting
Forum subscription ?

16. End of module reflection (14B) (Marcus Brodeur PhD project)
Summary
The obstructions and difficulties are very apparent during the team working activity
Students do see benefits upon reflection
End of module reflection (14B) (Marcus Brodeur PhD project)
57% major or profound improvement in ability to work collaboratively
n=236

17. Deeper dives using themes
Next stages
Deeper dives using themes
Specific activity groups
High/low Elluminate
High/Low Forum
All members of a team
What we hope to get from it:
How we create teams
How to develop team working skills
Nature of the team task
Thanks: Shailey Minocha & Marcus Brodeur

18. Basic slides on the cohort

19. Team size and Forum Traffic
N = 81 teams
posts
Team size, whilst averaging 9, did include some larger teams (for various management reasons made by the individual AL)…but there is an association between forum posts and team size (perhaps not surprisingly)…these data taken from 13 and 14B.
Mean +/- SD

20. Obstructions provided by us
Forums: Number of posts, inflexibility of forum threads (edit/split/merge)
Elluminate: technical issues, microphone use
Wiki: limited editing access

21. Forum use and Elluminate activity
342 Team-based (student led and organised) Elluminate sessions
Teams given moderator status to run their own Elluminate sessions…we have data on the number of recordings, in this case for 13B.

22. From Sarah’s analysis of 35 EMA reflections
Common themes
From Sarah’s analysis of 35 EMA reflections
How collaboration worked at different stages
Initial perceptions of group work
Structure of the team and how it functions
Benefits and obstacles of team work
Participation – big groups and personalities
Assessment criteria
Trust
How technology helps or hinders
What they did to make it work
What they didn’t do but recognised would have been good!
Some themes came through more strongly than others. Some themes were mentioned in nearly every EMA, others in just one or two EMAs. These themes map onto Kathy’s four themes (1 constraints on autonomy, 2 reflections about collaboration, 3 virtual others and 4 communicating online)