Campus Check: How to Effectively Collaborate on Group Work Assignments in an Online World
Campus Check: How to Effectively Collaborate on Group Work Assignments in an Online World
Do you know ThinkFree Workspace for collaborative documentation ? : http://www.thinkfree.com
Professors and lecturers increasingly mandate group work assignments in order to prepare students for today's job world and the overall increasing HR demand for graduates with strong teamworker and teamplayer skills. This is true for both traditional as well as virtual campuses across the US. Faced with the group work challenge, students make extensive use of the Internet in communicating and delegating workload between each other.
The ThinkFree team spoke with a group of students at San Jose State University about the challenges she faces with group work, what hurdles she had to take and ultimately what she found to be the perfect solution:
About how many group work assignments are there per class per semester?
Susan, a Communications major : Hmm, I think it really depends on the professor. We have some that are pushing group work pretty strongly and some that use it more for non-graded in-class discussions. However, across the board I would say that there are typically at least 2-3 group work assignments per class per semester. This definitely has picked up a lot from when I started as freshman and my older sister says she was maybe faced with this twice in her 4 years of colleague!! So I'd definitely have to say there is a push towards more group work. While I prefer working on assignments on my own, I do acknowledge the importance of getting my feet wet with this.
So how big are the assigned work groups usually and how do you work together?
Michael, an Engineering major : Yeah, group work is almost always assigned and you rarely get to pick your team. I guess that's kind of the purpose anyways, to make you deal with all kinds of people, attitudes and work ethics. Well, what works most of the time is a big face-to-face kickoff meeting where the workload gets spliced and diced in equal shares and then off everyone goes.
How do you get all these pieces together in the end then?
Ryan, a Journalism major : That's what causes the most headaches usually. People that get stuff in late, people that deliver poor work or people that just went off the brief. What really helps here though is to work on a common platform like ThinkFree Online. Thanks so much for introducing me to this!! Totally takes out the hassle of having to merge way too large Word docs in the end with laptops crashing and stuff being lost. With ThinkFree, everyone can just log on, lock the file and make their edits as they progress with their sections in realtime. The bonus here is clearly that everyone sees as stuff comes together. This acts as encouragement as well as enables the team to spot early on should there be a lazy one not getting their stuff done. Another thing, I really like is the notification everyone gets on who has just updated what. This way the team's work flow doesn't get jammed and it's so much more fluid, really efficient moving things along.
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