I had never been heavily involved in any group works in my school and college career. It wasn’t until my ENG 1181 class here that I had to do works in a group setting. The way this class was set up, I was paired with three other students and we four were a group for the entire semester. Unlike other classes, most of the assignments in this class had to be done in groups that were pretty new to me. With almost every assignment making us work in a group, I was dragging the group down. I was just starting college and I did not have the confidence to speak up. One of the main difficulties that we came across was the work not being divided properly and also the works that one person did was not available to others three until the next meeting. This problem occurred mostly because no one in the group took charge. I told the three other members the first day that I am shy to speak up so if there is group work. I would like them to give me work so I won’t have to be confused about which part to do. While that was my case, others weren’t able to separate individual work parts for themselves. After a couple of assignments, this started to become a major problem, so we got together and worked out a way to solve the problem.
In the end, we ended up devising a plan to meet every Friday and work as a group on assignments, and when we had to do assignments in our own time, we split the work depending on what the member was doing in class. If a person was doing the lab inside the class while others were recording, the person who did the lab will write the detail about how the lab was done while others write about the results. It was a quick and easy fix, but it helped our group tremendously. However, we did also have another problem, sharing our works and notes without having to actually meet. This was a problem because the works in this class were depended on the works done by other members. So, it required us to meet if we wanted to have all the material of the work together at the same place. This was becoming a problem as sometimes some members wouldn’t be able to come. Due to other works, it was hard to find the time. “Finding a chunk of time to complete all of the collaborative work is often difficult with varied schedules among the group members” (Frost, 2016).
While the first problem only required us to come up with a way to divide work, nothing technology-related was involved in solving that problem, but for this problem, we used a tool provided by OSU. We all signed up and joined a group that one of the members created in BuckeyeBox. Whenever a group member gets done with their share of work, they will either scan it or take a photo of it and upload it to the group page in BuckeyeBox. This allowed everyone to have access to the information without having to meet daily. While these two problems seem small and fixable, it was huge trouble for us at the beginning. We were all new and had no idea what exactly we were doing. Going forward in the future, I will always use BuckeyeBox as a first means of sharing information and group works between group members. Another great tool to have is GroupMe where all the members can communicate with each other. I use these two tools on a daily basis, and it has made my college life much easier.
https://elearningindustry.com/6-online-collaboration-tools-and-strategies-boosting-learning
The link above demonstrates some of the tools and strategies for successful online collaboration and learning.