M253 Team Working in Distributed Environments

is an older course that has evolved its course design as technologies have changed. Hear about a...

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Niall Sclater
9 February 2010

is an older course that has evolved its course design as technologies have changed. Hear about a course designed entirely around a series of collaborative activities, the challenges they faced around reluctant students and how they moved from FirstClass to forums, a wiki and experimentation with SecondLife.

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Live blog of David Morse's presentation

Team working is very much in demand from employers and is a requirement of the subject benchmark statement for Computing - and in professional accreditation by BCS.

Course been running since 2005 - Twitter, Facebook etc weren't yet available.

Computing students don't like collaboration much. Waite and Leonardi (2004) found that students prefer working alone, procrastinate with assignments, don't like process are combative and unwilling to support others.

M253 design: opted for long and thin presentation - Feb - July, no face to face meetings - getting students together synchronously is difficult. Structure of course is assessment driven. Try to emphasise process rather than product.

Students did manage to schedule times they could work together, and started using instant messaging.

In 2007 switched from FirstClass to the Moodle. Wanted to offer wikis integrated with forums, study planner etc in the one site.

Teams started using all sorts of non-OU systems eg Google Docs, Skype, MSN, Second Life.

Tutors do team allocation, typically 6 students per team, 4 per tutor. Overall tutor role is as a mentor, giving guidance when necessary. They rarely moderate - usually monitoring progress and giving teams a push or steering them. Also marking, providing feedback and responding to problems and issues. Tutors found it a very different experience.

Second Life has now been introduced and is liked by students. Not all students try it however.

Due to curriculum changes this course will be withdrawn however team working skills will be integrated into another course.

Niall Sclater
9:55am 9 February 2010 (Edited 10:08am 9 February 2010)

Discussion

An observation on programme design - why not embed teamworking into more modules during the degree rather than one single module specifically focused on teamworking?

Kevin Mayles
9:58am 9 February 2010

A good example of how to allow students to use external collaborative tools (skype / google / second life) whilst reporting results back into VLE tools (wiki / forum).

Kevin Mayles
10:06am 9 February 2010

Kevin, re: your programme design point.

The context might be different in different subject areas, but in discussions around M253 I've frequently heard expressed the idea that if you combine a teamworking course with a more technical topic then it is difficult to dissuade students away from the idea that the focus of the course is better widget production, rather than better teamworking. Certainly this is something that a minority of students on M253 find difficult to grasp: that there is no particular reward for their musings on the technical rights and wrongs of what the team has come up with.

re: external collaborative tools.

This didn't really come up during the event, but the M253 Course Team have been careful to avoid making the course tool-dependent, on the basis that this was bound to end up being a rod for our own backs as new tools became more widely used. As David did say during his presentation, our attitude is that if a team of students agree to a given tool's use (whether it be inside or outside the VLE) and they report back to the forum or wiki, that's fine. Personally I'd like to see more attention given to help students consider the characteristics of tools and to learn how different tools can support distributed teamworking in different ways.