Enabling digital collaboration spaces for students
Enabling digital collaboration spaces for students || Support
When setting group work tasks for your students, do
you provide them with a digital space where they can easily collaborate?
Whether the task requires a group or individual submission, it’s
possible to create a space within FLO for each group to discuss and
create their work.
Good practice guides and tip sheets
Good practice guides and tip sheets have been developed to support quality in both curriculum design and teaching practice. Good practice guides provide
a pedagogical overview and tip sheets provide you with practical strategies and ideas for implementation. Links to collaboration-related resources are provided below.
FLO contains several tools that lend themselves to group
collaboration that can be added to the topic by the topic coordinator.
Which tools are the most appropriate will depend upon the task, but all
can be used in group mode.
If you’re running an activity or assessment and want to manage who is in each group, you can set up the groups
within your topic and apply them to the chosen tools to create
dedicated collaboration spaces. If you would prefer students to manage
their own groups, you can use the group self-selection tool.
Simply create an empty grouping and apply it to the group
self-selection activity and the tool your students will collaborate in.
As students create their group, it’s automatically added to that
grouping and their collaboration space is created immediately.
The forum, blog, or wiki
can be used to provide students with a space for asynchronous
discussion and sharing of information via links or attachments. Each of
these can have groups and groupings
applied to allow student groups to have a private space to collaborate.
Keeping discussions and sharing within the topic means students are
still bound by Flinders netiquette rules.
Importantly, it also means staff can access the work students are doing
within their collaboration spaces to provide support and advice as and
when required.
To enable synchronous discussion students could use Collaborate. The Course room
is a space that’s always open where students can arrange to meet, but
they do need to understand it is not a private space just for their
group. Any student or staff member can enter this space at any time.
It’s not possible to create ‘private’ sessions for students within
Collaborate, but a session that individual groups could book for their
own use may be an option. This would rely on topic participants being
respectful to each other and not interrupting each other’s sessions. If
these suggestions within Collaborate are feasible options, you should
consider editing the course room or session settings. Making the default
attendee role ‘presenter’ will allow students to share their work;
making the default attendee role ‘moderator’ will allow students to
record their session, again being aware that recordings will be
accessible by all participants. These ideas could be appropriate for a
class activity that’s not assessed, for example, to provide students with
an opportunity to practice a skill they may later be assessed on. For
text based synchronous discussion you could set up the Chat tool using the students’ groups.