When I started reading doing the reading for this week, I definitely had what one may call “Deja Vu”. There have been many times in my college career where I have been assigned to group projects and had difficulties completing the assignment. For example, this semester I decided to take my spanish class online. With that we had many group assignments, one of the assignments was to meet the group on video chat and have a thirty minute conversation. The instructor assigned groups two weeks before the assignment and
The problem was that some of the group members lived in different time zones so that was the main problem in the group. Also no one in the group contacted one another until a few days before the assignment is due. So by the day of the assignment because of lack of communication , we did not find a time that we were all available to do the assignment (Lisk 2010).
What I’ve learned is that the first thing the group members should have done was to have gotten to know one another (Richardson 2004). This would’ve allowed us to figure out the time zones each of us live in. The second thing we could is communicated through email or group chats to get to know one another and see what their schedules were like throughout the week so she could so the assignment on time.
There are many different tools we could have used to communicate. In this week’s modules we learned of communication tools like buckeyebox to store information. The group could have used buckeyemail calendar or doodle to see what times would be available to meet for everyone and accommodate the time-zone difference.
Richardson, C. (2004). Participating in Group Projects Online. In G. M. Piskurich (Ed.), Getting the most from online learning: A learner’s guide(pp. 145-152). San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.
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.