Collaborative exercise

As per my last post (May 1), students this week commenced working in teams to collaboratively devise concepts for their branching e-learning scenarios. I suspected that team ideas would be more engaing than individual ones and I wanted the students to experience for themselves the effectiveness of collaboration within the creative process.

Here are some details/observations from the f2f class where this occcurred:

1. I suggested they form their own groups of 2 or 3.
2. Initially a little slow to form groups, but this resolved itself in under 3 minutes with one exception (see 3 below). There are 6 groups overall.
   
3. A very quiet individual in the class did not leave their seat for some time. I encouraged them individually, then mentioned to the whole class that they make sure noone is left out. A group of 2 then invited the remaining individual to join them. This group performed really well and came up with some strong concepts for the project.
4. One group retired to a break-out room where it was a little quieter to work -- this group completed their planning first.
5. After some initial hesitation with the theme of "safety" --- following brief brainstorming, all groups devised interesting and different approaches. I selected a deliberately 'dry' topic in order to stretch their creative problem-solving muscles --- the groups rose to the challenge.
6. Most classes for these students are computer based -- this was a pleasant departure from that format.
   
7. The mood in the room was very upbeat as they worked with their concepts - I congratulated them on their efforts. It felt very gratifying to see my learning ideas work as planned.
   

The planning exercise involves making a decision tree ( a little like a 'choose your own adventure' story) and each branching decision needs to teach the audience a concept. I chose to do this in a f2f environment for the following reasons:

1. This activity needed some guidance. When there were questions about how to frame some concepts -- small suggestions from me got things moving again quickly. I needed to be there.
2. Previously I had investigated online mindmaps to see if this would work for this exercise and decided against it, based on the time it would take to brainstorm online or asynchronously.
3. Previous learning pref discussions in this class have revealed the kinesthetic learning prefs of these students. As I suggested using mindmaps and other tactile techniques (postits etc) for brainstorming ideas, this worked best f2f. And quicker too.
4. The collaboration of the groups seemed more effective in person, rather than online. It was more animated, funny at times, full of body language, very expressive etc.
5. Groups got most of the work done in the 2hr f2f class - some groups will meet later to finish.

So oddly enough, even though a flexible learning environment is designed to largely solve the time-poor problems of learners - there are times when a f2f approach seems the quickest to a solution.