Letting students take control: designing collaborative learning exercises for virtual community

Helen Merrick
Curtin University of Technology

Keywords: online; collaboration; community

This paper considers the challenges of designing appropriate, student-centred assessments for a mixed-mode online learning environment. It focuses on a second-year unit, Virtual Communities, which is delivered through WebCT to internal and external students, and also Open University students. A central aim of the unit is to provide experience in managing and participating in online community/ team environments. Since first writing and teaching this unit in 2001, the assessment task relating to this outcome has changed significantly from year to year, in response both to student feedback and technological developments. With each iteration, changes to the assessment involved not only the nature of the task, but also the technology that was required to be used, the extent or nature of student interaction, and the extent to which student participation was directly assessed. I will focus on three key iterations of the online community assessment task: an online virtual team group project, a communal blog, and finally a collaborative wiki.

In reflecting on the process of evaluation and re-design, a number of factors are considered:

• my own experiences of teaching and coordinating the unit;
• student online activity and rate of participation;
• student feedback and evaluation;
• analysis of resulting projects; and finally
• student grades.

In general student satisfaction with and enthusiasm for the task increased with each iteration, which moved from a clearly-defined, directly assessed group project to a highly experiential learning task with no direct assessment for the final outcome. In concluding, the paper considers a number of questions raised by this comparative exercise, including how best to design assessments that serve both mixed-mode and online-only students, and how to respond to differentials in student learning styles and openness to online collaborative work.