Module 4
Lecture Notes - Part 2

Team-Based Learning

A. Overview

The advantages of team-based (or group-based, peer-to-peer, collaborative, etc.) learning have been well identified, tested, and demonstrated in the literature (e.g. Berge, 2002; Klemm, 1998; Liu et al., 2002; Mazur, 1997, Michaelsen et al., 2004; Rinear, 2003; Sherron and Boettcher, 1997; Swan et al., 2006; Sweet and Michaelsen, 2007).

Key features of effective team-based learning

Permanent and purposefully heterogeneous work groups that promote group community-building (i.e. interdependence of members) and consideration of varied backgrounds and points of view.

Peer instruction and evaluation features that facilitate development of writing, argumentation, and interpersonal skills.

Course modules comprised primarily of frequent, resource-supported, instructor-monitored, and graded group activities that pace the team members' development in the course and require/support/ensure content coverage, attention to instructor feedback, and individual accountability and grading of team members.

Well-designed collaborative-learning contexts accomplish

student motivation and engagement,

meaningful instructor-to-student and student-to-student interactions,

instructor- and peer-led learning, and

formative (i.e. guiding) and summative (i.e. evaluative) assessment,

by wrapping a course around a set of self-contained, resource-supported, instructor-monitored, and interrelated group assignments.

B. Facilitating & Managing Team-Based Learning: Potential Problems

In practice, working in groups includes numerous potential drawbacks that challenge its effectiveness as a learning tool. Watch the two short videos below for some relevant insights by Drs. Rubin (6':00") and Opitz (2':30"). The videos were filmed by IDD Video Services and posted on Vimeo.

[open in Vimeo - no transcript available]

What undermines the effectiveness of teamwork?

For the most part, team-based contexts and activities are introduced in addition to a course’s standard assessment tools and consist of open-ended, low-stakes online discussion forums and student-dreaded group projects.

Discussion forums usually involve little direction/monitoring beyond specifying discussion-etiquette rubrics and the minimum number of required posts, contributing to discussions that are often tedious and take up a large amount of the instructor’s and students’ time with minimal return.
Group projects usually become sources of frustration for those in the group that end up doing most of the work or provide disengagement excuses for those in the group that are not motivated to do well in the class. Ultimately, group work can generate anticlimactic grade experiences that neither recognize nor fulfill anyone, while also failing to truly capture if and how much learning has occurred.

Common pitfalls of collaborative work therefore include:

1. Tedious online discussions that produce little more than busywork for
    instructors and students.

2. Potentially unfair distribution of workload among group members.

3. Potential internal allocation to only portions of the full assignment to each
    group member, resulting in an incomplete image of the course material to all
    members.

4. An impersonal group grade that fails to address each student’s individual
    contribution, skills, and accomplishments, consequently failing to truly
    motivate any of the students.

C. Facilitating & Managing Team-Based Learning: Suggested Practices

Group formation and size

If a high degree of uniformity can be assumed in terms of the student's overall education, interests, and general background, groups may be formed by the instructor through random membership assignment, assignment by last name, or any other nonsystematic assignment method. The uniformity assumption is likely to hold in cases where the online students come from the same program or institution and are past their first year of study.

For more diverse audiences, research suggests that self-formation of student groups is the most effective method (Lawrence-Slater, 2006).
In an example of self-formation of groups, students are asked to post a brief biography including their interests, the degree being studied, their institutional affiliation, an email address, and (ideally, but not necessarily) an image of themselves. All participants then access these details and "meet" others with a view to forming a group. This technique enables the formation of potentially successful work groups, facilitates community building, and constitutes an initial, low-stakes task where students experience online collaboration and can demonstrate to the instructor that they are able to successfully complete a collaborative task.

In terms of group size, a quad (i.e. four students per group) is generally considered the ideal. The group is large enough to include the diversity of opinions, experiences, and learning styles needed to facilitate problem solving but not so large that students can get lost or hide.

Effective design and management of team-based learning

Overview

The discussion-based and instructor-moderated group-work management method outlined below has been designed to promote meaningful participation of all members in a group, facilitate peer learning and evaluation, reduce student anxiety with regards to assignment completion, and ensure that instructor feedback will appear at a time when it is likely to have the most impact on student learning (i.e. before assignment completion).

Collaborative-assignment management

Groups of ideally four students draft and edit each assignment online, with input from the instructor, and submit it via an appropriate discussion forum.

Each assignment question constitutes a separate set of discussion threads that includes one thread for drafting and one for submission of the assignment responses.

Students are permitted to modify and build on their posts, a feature that helps alleviate some of their fear of error and positively influences their engagement and performance.

The instructor follows and grades the entire process of assignment drafting, rather than simply the final submission, converting his/her traditional “judge-like” role to that of a coach. This motivates students to enter into useful lively debates about their assignments, working, in the process, on their argumentation, critical-thinking, collaboration, reading/writing/editing, and timeliness skills.

Such a setting both requires and facilitates monitored student-to-student and student-to-instructor interactions. It presents students with instructor-guided opportunities to clarify, deepen, and communicate their grasp of the materials and instructors with the information needed to grade each group member individually.

Assessment-driven collaborative learning

In the described context, group members are able to:

make their own individual contributions to the assignment questions, while
gauging their understanding of the supporting material relative to that of the rest of the group members;

comment on and edit the contributions of their fellow group members and enter into meaningful, assignment-related discussion with their peers and the instructor;

take advantage of instructor feedback during the assignment-drafting process;

improve their skills and confidence as writers, editors, debaters, and peer reviewers, as they argue their points to come to a group consensus;

earn an individual grade that fairly reflects their contributions to the group assignments.

The proposed design has all the communication and critical-thinking-skills practice advantages of group work without the disadvantages outlined in the previous section. By being part of the drafting process, the instructor has the opportunity to provide feedback that students will pay attention to and which will make a difference in their understanding of the materials, argumentation skills, and overall performance. Such feedback can be personalized (answering a student’s assignment-related posts) while avoiding duplication (the feedback is available to all students in the group). In addition to providing opportunities for in-depth discussion on issues raised within the course materials, the recorded discussions end up also constituting the students’ personalized lecture notes.

The resulting assessment-driven collaborative context supports a useful mix of personalized, collaborative, and actively enhanced learning and helps assess learning outcomes in a comprehensive, dynamic, individual, and fair manner. Both open-book completion of assignments and student collaboration are encouraged, putting more emphasis on understanding and application rather than simple memorization of the course materials, while avoiding easy cheating, a common assessment problem especially in online courses.

In other words, discussion-based and instructor-monitored and assisted group assignments provide a single place where both faculty- and peer-led instruction transpires, personalized lecture notes are created, meaningful discussions and collaborations take place, assignments are completed, formative and summative assessment is facilitated, and learning occurs.

On average, courses following the suggested format have resulted in two grade levels improvement, 10 percent reduction in instructor workload (quantified in terms of the time devoted to grading and entering feedback to assignments), and 30 percent improvement in student satisfaction, when compared to other versions of the same courses (Vassilakis, in press).

D. Examples

The collaborative assignments in DOTS and in the previously reviewed "Topics in Musicianship" course represent attempts to facilitate student-centered, project-based, and team-based learning.

Sample communication courses implementing a problem-based approach to learning. Samford University, Birmingham, AL.

Project-based collaborative assignments from the University of Delaware
See, for example, The Colorado River; Whose water is it anyway?

Student-centered, project-based, and team-based strategies and assignment examples compiled by the University of Maryland, University College (some links to examples on this site are broken).
Examples include a historical "whodunit?" created by the University of Victoria, Canada.

Examples of problem-based learning activities by the Australian Flexible Learning Network.

IRC Français. Project designed to help students learn French through active conversation with other students. Georgia Institute of Technology.

Web resources on collaborative and student-centered learning accompanying MacGregor et al. (2000). University of Minnesota.

Resources on writing project-based collaborative assignments. Medical School, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada.

Guidelines for drafting group-problem-solving activities. Illinois Online Network.

E. Quality Matters Standards

Standard 5: Learner Engagement (.pdf)
"Meaningful interaction between the instructor and students, among students, and between students and course materials is employed to motivate students and foster intellectual commitment and personal development."
Standard 5.1: The learning activities promote the achievement of the stated
                       learning objectives
Standard 5.2: Learning activities foster instructor-student, content-student, and
                       student-student interaction
Standard 5.3: Clear standards are set for instructor responsiveness and
                       availability (turn-around time for email, grade posting, etc.)
Standard 5.4: The requirements for student interaction are clearly articulated

Module 4 Lecture Notes - Part 2