3 Collaborative Strategy for Online Teams
Design Case Review of a Collaborative Strategy for Online Teams (Messier, S., 2021)
Introduction
This paper describes Ergulec and Zydney’s (2019) design case on a collaborative strategy that focused on grouping strategies and team building activities to enhance team collaboration for online learners. In my facilitation practice, I mostly focus on team building and work closely with instructional designers in a similar capacity of the instructor involved in this study. From that interest, I will share the instructors and students’ experiences as well as reflect on the design failures and future reiteration for practice.
Design Context
The collaborative strategy was implemented as part of the Communications in Small Groups (CSG) online course at a midwestern university. The CSG course focused on positive team synergies and overcoming team dysfunctions. The participants were part-time graduate students working full-time in education and living in different geographical locations with different time zones. The course was hosted on the university online learning management system (LMS) and the students used Google Doc to collaborate. Students were also encouraged to post their profiles on an online presentation tool (e.g., Prezi, Animoto, VoiceThread). The CSG course instructor was acting as a peer debriefer.
Design Team and Process
Funda Ergulec and Janet Mannheimer Zydney collaborated together on this design case. Ergulec, a postdoctoral researcher in educational technology at Osmangazi University, was the lead designer on the pilot. She conducted this study as part of her doctoral dissertation. Zydney is an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati in instructional design and technology. As the original designer of the collaborative strategy, she successfully implemented team-building artifacts and group activities in two online courses. As part of her work, she developed a “study habit questionnaire” (Ergulec & Zydney, 2019, p. 33) to group students based on their skills and preferences, which was tested in the CSG course.
As illustrated in figure one, the lead designer and the instructor selected from the designers’ instructional design website, learning activities involving group cohesion, group composition, and group interdependence to develop the course. As part of the design decisions, the instructor’s role focused on introducing activities and intentionally left it to the groups “to utilize strategies that create movement within groups, to recognize when a group has stalled, and to develop and apply strategies that help a group move through dysfunction” (Ergulec & Zydney, 2019, p. 30).
FIGURE 1. Course Design Process
The Students Experience
In the first module, the students were asked to complete the study habit questionnaire and from their responses, the instructor divided the participants into five groups of three students each. Based on Zydney’s experience, three was the optimal group size for effective group collaboration. Then, the students created a student profile and completed the “Keirsey Instrument” (Ergulec & Zydney, 2019, p. 28) to understand their personality temperament. The test was linked to the “Hinting Game” (Ergulek & Zydney, 2017, as cited in McDonald et al., 2012, p. 28), as an introduction to “recognize one’s own style of participation within groups” (p. 28). Students were encouraged to innovate when posting their introduction by using an online presentation tool of their choice (e.g., Prezi, Animoto). In the second module, the students used Google Doc to post their reflections on working in teams from the “Fears, Hopes, And Norms Protocol” (Ergulek & Zydney, 2017, as cited in McDonald et al., 2012, p. 29) as well as the “What Stumps Me” (Ergulec & Zydney, 2019, p. 29) icebreaker activities. For all modules, students took turn on being the facilitator and wrote personal reflections on team collaborative work.
Design Evaluation
The collaborative strategy had positive developments and the authors’ influence on the design were noteworthy. For instance, their design experience led to an instructional website strategically organized with tested learning activities from previous designs (Gray, 2020) that could be fluidly implemented in the pilot (Boling, 2010). Zydney’s experience on ideal group size and her study habit questionnaire for grouping created a successful experience for most of the teams. The level and the variety of online interactive activities and reflections contributed to transformational synergies (Veletsianos, 2011), especially the What Stumps Me and the Hinting Game activities that furthered connections.
While the strategy was positive in some respects, there were two areas of weakness: failed group assignments and the instructor role. Failed group assignments resulted from incomplete information from the study habit questionnaire. As a result, one group with perceived complementary abilities struggled with completing their projects. The authors learned that although balancing people with different skills may work in some groups, team members with the same temperament are more productive. Next, the instructor used a hands-off approach in the course and although it was purposeful, the lack of instructional intervention impacted one group that struggled with completing assigned tasks. Lastly, there was a missed opportunity with this small cohort, for the instructor to use flexibility in implementing innovative changes to the artifacts (Dron, 2014) throughout the course.
Moreover, there were complexities to the design that were not considered in the strategy (Howard, 2011) such as trust and psychological safety. Dixon (2017) described psychological safety as a “sense of confidence that the group will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up” (p. 140). If one member is not willing to share their personal information out of fear to be dismissed or judged, then the team cannot fully collaborate and experiment together. Fortunately, design failures and complexities have greater potential for innovation and “breakthrough thinking emerging from differences in perspective” (McKim & Goodwin, 2021, para. 11) and experience.
Conclusion
In future iteration, the instructor’s enactment after an activity is introduced should be clarified. As per Dron & Anderson (2014), “learners working collaboratively deliberately support one another’s learning, negotiate the division of tasks, and help one another to learn by using and/or developing group processes in more or less formal ways to produce some common or individual outputs” (p. 45). In that sense, the instructor should still encourage collaboration within teams but intervene when a group derails. Additionally, the instructor should validate the students’ study preferences through their reflections for better grouping decisions. Lastly, further examination of the design decisions may uncover further complexities (Howard, 2011).
Overall, this design case was well articulated, and I appreciated the transparency of the design failures from the authors (Howard, 2011). The collaborative strategy has a lot of potential both for the learners and the instructor. Eventually, further research to uncover complexities would lead to a more comprehensive collaborative strategy.
References:
Boling, E. (2010). The need for design cases: Disseminating design knowledge. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 1(1). https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijdl/article/view/919/978
Dixon, N. (2017). Learning together and working apart: routines for organizational learning in virtual teams. The Learning Organization, 24(3), 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1108/TLO-12-2016-0101
Dron, J. (2014). Chapter 9: Innovation and Change: Changing how we Change. In Zawacki-Richter, O. & T. Anderson (Eds.), Online distance education: Towards a research agenda. Athabasca, AB: AU Press. https://www.aupress.ca/books/120233-online-distance-education/
Dron, J. & Anderson, T. (2014). Teaching Crowds. Athabasca University Press. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120235
Ergulec, F. and Zydney J. (2019). A design case for implementing a collaborative strategy for online teams. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 10(1), 25-34. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijdl/article/view/24120/32666
Gray, C. (2020). Markers of Quality in Design Precedent. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 11(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijdl.v11i3.31193
Howard, C. D. (2011). Writing and rewriting the instructional design case: A view from two sides. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 2(1). https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijdl/article/view/1104/1315
Veletsianos, G. (2011). Designing opportunities for transformation with emerging technologies. Published in Educational Technology, 51(2), 41-46. https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/5056/designing-opportunities-transformation-emerging-technologies.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
