Collaborate at a Distance

This week, I learnt about how to collaborate with group members while taking a online course. Actually, as an international students here in the Unite States, I always tent to be very shy during the collaborative works. But after I get through this module, and learnt some useful techniques of collaborating, I feel more confidence and comfortable on the group works.

First of all, one of the most important ting of group work is communication.Effective communication provides information that is clearly under­ stood by group members, information for member reflections, and direction that leads to the group members’ ability to act(Lisk and Quartuccio, 131). And online group communication needs more skills since the group members are not physically there and the group meetings should be set up in a appropriate frequently rate. Communication is the base of everything in the collaboration. Group members should first communicate to reach an agreement on a goal and work for it together. while working for that goal as a group,   the group members should communicate with each other in order to check the state of the work and if the work meets the requirements.

Furthermore, the other critical elements of collaboration is  managing the conflict in the group.  No matter how carefully you communicate with your group members and follows all the suggestions, the conflict is often inevitable(Lisk and Quartuccio, 133). When conflict appears, we should first figure out what is this conflict about and how to lead the group members to an agreement again. While solving the conflict, we should remember that, express our feelings with words, not actions. When we finally manage the conflict successfully, we should figure out what is the reason of the conflict and how to avoid it in the future.

With those useful advices, I hope I can do better in my future collaborative assignment, no matter is online for offline.

Reference

Lisk P., & Quartuccio, K. (2010). Managing Group Assignments in the Online Learning Environment. In Brosche, Theresa A. M. (Ed.), Successful Online Learning: Managing the Online Learning Environment Efficiently and Effectively (pp. 127-142). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

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