Reflection 6

Introduction

Over the past 7 weeks I have begun to hone my skills on the online learning platform. Although there remains a solid in classroom experience the shift to e-learning has begun and with the technological advances sees no sign of slowing down. With the ability now to collaborate and cooperate with peers outside our normal tutorial, group orientated learning has evolved, leading to a revamped set of advantages and disadvantages.  

Advantages

As mentioned there are many advantages to group work and Maryellen Weimer (2013) mentions, students within groups have the ability to;

• learn content, as in master the material
• learn content at those deeper levels we equate with understanding
• learn how groups function productively
• learn why groups make better decisions than individuals
• learn how to work with others

However, Weimer (2013) goes on to mention that if students are just put into groups without the potential for learning, most will begin to have a negative connotation to group work in the future. There must also be so direction from the teacher as to how the dynamics of the group should run. For example assigning a leader or assigning tasks for students.

The past seven weeks, have all been about online group work rather than face to face. This type of group work opens up another realm of advantages that are specific to the e-learning platform;

·         Out of class contact with group

·         The ability to re-read ideas from another group member

·         The recorded document for each group member (Blogger postings)

For example, being able to read other students blog trigged me to refer to a course reading that I forgot to include. Moving from the sheer lack of memory on my part, being able to read over other students’ blogs and get a different view point lead me to better my postings, by having to justify and elaborate on my ideas.

Disadvantages

Although there are many advantages to group learning there are also some very distinct disadvantages that are potentially only specific to online learning.

·         Technology failure (e.g power outage, network failure, device issues)

·         Having to wait for a reply or explanation from another group member

·         The loss of tenor or potential misinterpretation

In my personal experience I found these issues to not affect me to dramatically, however they have to potential to create havoc amongst a group, especially the dispanding of a group is plagiarism or online arguments take place. The nature of how we as a class group has used this e-learning platform has been a mixture of collaborative and cooperative learning. 

Collaborative or Cooperative? 

Morrison (2012) in her article has defined cooperative and collaborative learning as; 

·         cooperate: the process of working together to the same end, versus 

·         collaborate: to work jointly on an activity to produce or create something

She goes on to state that collaborative learning requires the higher order thinking skills such as that on the higher ends of Blooms taxonomy scale. From the beginning of our blog postings our group has considerably performed better and that can be accredited to the way in which we collaborated throughout the journey, although the comments were almost impossible to monitor, but I will get to that further on. The key to the success for this platform was also how the lecturers and introduced blogger to the class. Morrison (2012) insists that to have valuable and educationally rich collaborative learning online the teacher must establish and introduce the online medium towards the forefront of a lesson or in our case, the term.

My Major gripe

This task I believe only had one major flaw, and that is all to do with the technology rather than how, when or why we posted our blogs. The comments system (of blogger) I believe left a lot to be desired and really took away from the overall experience. Being left a comment by another student and having no notification that it had arrived often broke down the fluency of the collaboration trying to take place.

Conclusion

Finally, the last seven weeks of this course have opened my eyes to a whole new way of group work that can be implemented I to my future classroom. The tools that we have used and experienced and the explanation and investigation that other students have made about them, shows myself as an educator that there is more to teaching than textbooks and notepads. The way in which we have received feedback from our peers is also another key learning experience I will take away, as I have found the peer evaluation will lead to improved results and effort. This is simply due to the fact that even though we are collaborating we are also competing to be the best, and with the open and online nature of the blogger forum we have been able to do this with almost no limits.

References

Morrison, D. (2012) Online Groups- Cooperative or Collaborative? Retrieved fromhttps://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/online-groups-cooperative-or-collaborative/

Weimer, M. (2013) Five Things Students Can Learn from Group Work, Retrieved fromhttp://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/five-things-students-can-learn-through-group-work/