2 Creating Community During Covid with Project Management (CCDC)

Introduction
This design case describes a group project within a second year project management course offered online, called Creating Community During Covid (CCDC). CCDC was designed in response to pandemic restrictions in 2020 when students who had been attending courses in person were now in online classes. The CCDC project was designed to take place over a semester and was offered three times; fall 2020, winter 2021 and fall 2021 through the business program at Coast Mountain College, a small rural college located on Tsimhisan Territory in Northwest BC.

Background
In each of the three intakes the majority of participants were international students. In the fall 2020 offering they were facing covid – 19 pandemic restrictions. They were deemed essential workers in their service industry jobs, isolated from families and their student community and navigating their learning in ways they could not have anticipated when they registered for their program the year previously. CCDC design was grounded in empathy learning theory (as cited in Meyers,

Rowell, Wells & Smith, 2019 ) using the project based learning model (Roberts, 2016) and the adoption of an ungrading approach (Stommel, 2018).

Design/ Innovation Process
The design of CCDC  is grounded in Bolings’ empathy theory (Meyer et al.,2019) This design process was aligned with cognitive empathy where designers consider students’ perspectives, including their social and personal situations. CCDC projects allowed students to maintain their relationships with colleagues and use their creativity to shape the community while simulating the project manager experience within the Project Based Learning (PBL) model (Roberts, 2016) and incorporated ungrading methods (Stommel, 2018).

The instructor played a dual role replicating a sponsorship relationship and acting as a coach during weekly online video conference meetings, guiding the groups through the processes of project management, the documentation and the communication norms of the profession and discussing student work prior to submission.

Students were given guidance so they could earn 100% on their work before submission. The student work was held in a google drive, shared with the instructor and was only considered for grading once students submitted all the documents into the LMS. Rarely did students submit a document that would earn them less than 100% however if they were going to do so it was done with the instructors’ knowledge and student groups knew what grade to anticipate. Students were reflecting on their work with the instructor and assessing it collaboratively using a similar approach to ungrading (Stommel, J. 2018).  Execution was only 10% of the marks for the overall project and was on a complete or incomplete 1 scale rubric. Students received 1 mark for doing what they said they would do and zero if they did not do what they said they would do.

Deadlines for each of the project stages were in the syllabus but there was no penalty for not meeting those deadlines because of the uniqueness of projects undertaken by the groups. Negotiating deadlines that made sense for the projects and within the demands of students’ personal schedules were part of the weekly group meetings. For example, a group created a community lunch around Diwali celebrations which required them to speed up their project execution to align their lunch with the celebration date. Another group slowed their project down to meet the needs of the food bank who they were partnering with for Christmas activities.

The CCDC aligns with the stages of PBL (Roberts, 2016) stages as shown here:

Evaluation
In the first CCDC offering in fall 2020 students had been in face to face classes together the previous semester. They were primarily in the same city, with only two out of the thirty person cohort moving from the area to complete their studies through distance options. Project execution was 100%, but with each iteration of the CCDC projects students became more geographically dispersed and prior relationships were not guaranteed, execution of projects dropped with each course. Student groups were typically choosing tangible service projects such as volunteering for a non profit society or holding a movie night at the campus, but the ability to execute these types of projects became limited as the groups are more geographically dispersed. One way to mitigate this issue may be to require students who are regionally dispersed to only choose digital projects to pursue.
Another way to potentially mitigate issues with groups not performing well may be to lengthen the time to dedicated to establishing group norms. In the second week of the course an online scavenger hunt was completed in a synchronous session with the intention of using the activity to help the groups through Tuckmans’ model of group development (Tuckman,1965) . After this activity student groups were tasked with creating their team agreements. More time for these activities may be helpful to increase the chance of group success.
While the execution stage was worth the least amount of overall marks for the course some groups would forgo their planning stage, instead choosing to forge ahead with execution. While the grades for the execution stage were low and the weekly meetings were used to refocus groups on the right stages of the project, there were still groups compelled to move ahead, defeating the purpose of learning project management phases.  For groups who did not execute there was a strong sense of disappointment and concern about failure of the course overall.
A risk in this design is to the reputation of the instructor and institution as students are approaching stakeholders about their projects. This can lead to some messy interactions. For example a group wanted to fundraise for a local wildlife shelter in numerous ways, but in their plans had not discussed this with the wildlife shelter society and had created coin collection boxes to display in local retailers. The optics around this were sensitive as it could be perceived that students were raising money for the society without actually including the society in the fundraising. These types of issues are excellent learning but can lead to unforeseen consequences to the institution if not caught early. There is likely some way to further design the projects for a minimum threshold of consideration in planning before groups can discuss the project with stakeholders or as in the first course, task groups to only build community within the student body rather than the broader community.

References:
Meyers, S., Rowell, K., Wells, M. & Smith, B. (2019)  Teacher Empathy: A Model of Empathy for Teaching for Student Success. College Teaching. 67(36), 160-168.
DOI: 10.1080/87567555.2019.1579699

Stommel, J. (2018, March 11). How to Ungrade. Jesse Stommel. https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin. 63(6), 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100