I attended the Learning in Community: Designing Successful Collaborative Projects for Online Courses presentation (only part 1, as I had to present during the part 2 time slot) with Jan Engle for FSI 2010.  About 10 people attended. Some of my key take-aways:
  • Group projects fall on a continuum of Cooperative Activities (mostly divide and conquer) to Collaborative Activities (work must be done jointly for a single, consolidated deliverable).
  • Driven by:
    • Level of online learning experience
    • Level of group learning experience
    • Level of virtual group learning experience
    • How well students know one another
    • Prior online teaching experience of instructor
    • Amount of time available for activity
  • Suggested structures:
    • Allow plenty of time
    • Establish groups early
    • 4-6 students for cooperative tasks; 2-4 for collaborative tasks
    • Provide specific instructions
    • Provide milestones with due dates
    • Provide teambuilding strategies
  • Provide group-specific collaborative technologies:
    • text chat
    • audio conferencing
    • discussion board
    • email
  • Creating Groups
    • Instructor-formed
    • Randomized
    • Self sign-up
  • General tips:
    • Don't allow late adds (beyond, say, first week); don't start group projects until after add/drop period
    • Consider drafting a "best practices of online group work" document; make it required reading/guidelines for those inexperienced with online group work and optional for experienced groups
    • If instructor assigns groups, use tracking tool and sort by number of logins (not total time); then group first X students together, then second X students together, etc.; rather than pairing most frequently accessed with least.  Let's type-As work together (and learn to work with other type-As) and anti-type-As work together (who all work in a flurry near end of project).  Quality tends be the same as more evenly distributed arrangement and group cohesion tends to be better (except for most type-A group, perhaps).  Good idea!