REBUILDING
EDUCATION

Analysis

When successful, collaboration for a group project can help students dive into the subject deeply, learn  from their fellow students’ experiences and insights, and build new friendships. Unfortunately, we  personally all encountered group projects with free riders, awkward silences, and even conflicts. A  survey we conducted among VU and UVA students confirms these stories (see next slide). We received  stories about differences in expectations and working styles, unclear group roles and allocation of tasks,  lack of communication, and the list unfortunately goes on. And that is a shame, because we also hear  stories how group projects can provide a way to “meet new people, be inspired from others and just  having fun.” 

Students hope to get prepared for a successful start in the job market in their time at university, so why  is there so little emphasis on teamwork skills? And indeed, we all have numerous group projects, but  when in our trajectory at university, do we actually learn how to collaborate? Moreover, our teachers  are not trained to facilitate collaboration properly and the institutions do not provide space and time  for more focus on collaboration. We thus found a clear need for a platform to facilitate these needs.

Redesign

Our redesign consists of a website, that features a quiz and worksheets. Unfortunately, we were not able to make a working quiz by ourselves that could feature on the website. Our solution is to show you the type of questions and format of the quiz in these slides. You can visit the website here. This is the platform where students can take the quiz and download the worksheets. Additionally, please click here to access the slides of the quiz.

Part of the redesign are our worksheets. The first one is called ‘The  Starting Questions’, and the purpose of this worksheet is to be aware  of your good traits and your bad traits concerning collaboration. There  is also room for self-reflection.  

The goal is that all team members fill out the worksheet and then  discuss the ‘results’ with each other. Person A can be indecisive  sometimes, so let’s all look out for this and acknowledge it when it  happens. This way we can learn from each other. 

The first worksheet focuses on the following aspects:  group skills & goals, personal skills & goals and  assignment related questions.  Ideally, there would be more worksheets for each  phase of the group assignment (before, during, after).  The first worksheet can be downloaded from the website, and is also accessible by clicking here.

Justification

Our justification can be broken down into three key sections: Pedagogical  Justification, Developmental Justification, and Design Justification. 

The first two sections relate to why a student should use our tool, while the third  section presents a more ‘meta’ level justification of how our tool is designed.  

Each of these shall be explored further on the following pages with supporting  theory to illustrate and explain the decisions we have made within the redesign.  

Before moving forward however, we should note that the following justifications have  been written in student-friendly language, because at the end of the day this is a tool  made for students to use (Vilceanu, 2015). Thus we have avoided using overly  technical terms or very specific jargon.

Pedagogical Justifications

The first thing to consider is that this is an educational tool, thus its usefulness must be reflected, in some sense, in terms of pedagogical  benefits, and this leads us to the question of the usefulness of collaboration. 

There has been extensive research to show that effective collaboration results in many pedagogical benefits. First of all it provides an  active form of learning (Johnson & Johnson, 2008; Bentley & Warwick [1], 2013). This is in the sense that within-group assignments  students are provided with the opportunity to actively engage with the course material. Thus as they are active rather than passive  within their learning there tends to be increased motivation and engagement (Johnson & Johnson, 2008; Bentley & Warwick [1], 2013;  Williams et al, 1991). 

In fact it has also been shown that just cues of working together fuel intrinsic motivation. Which is to say that the social element of  group work results in student feeling more interested in the tasks, having greater enjoyment of the tasks, and having better performance on  the tasks (Carr & Walton, 2014). 

What all of this means is that students are likely to have greater retention of the material they learn during these projects as they are  more involved with them (Colbeck et al, 2000; Thom, 2020). 

Furthermore group work provides an opportunity for use of peer-strength and co-learning. What these terms mean is that students are  able to rely upon each other in order to compensate for certain strengths and weaknesses (Williams et al, 1991; Bentley & Warwick,  2013; Köppe, 2012; Colbeck et al, 2000). It also allows for them to reduce their individual workloads as they are able to divide tasks  amongst each other (Köppe, 2012; de Cortie et al, 2013).

Having said all of this, these benefits are only possible with effective collaboration and as we found during the survey and additional  research, this is seldom the experience of university students (Johnson & Johnson, 2008; Bentley & Warwick [1], 2013; Bentley &  Warwick [2], 2013; Köppe, 2012; de Cortie et al, 2013; Colbeck et al, 2000; Williams et al, 1991). Thus we hope that through  creating a tool which addresses the key issues we can facilitate more effective collaboration. 

One of the key issues we identified was differences in expectations and working styles (Bentley & Warwick [1], 2013; Bentley &  Warwick [2]; LaBeouf, 2016; Köppe, 2012; de Cortie et al, 2013) and thus in order to minimise these we have included questions  pertaining to these (1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9) within the ‘The Starting Questions’ worksheet in order that students are able to identify and  address these differences prior to starting the assignment. 

Likewise we found that unclear group roles and allocation of tasks can result in many problems arising during the course of the  assignment, such as redundancy in regards to particular tasks or roles (Bentley & Warwick [1], 2013; Thom, 2020; LaBeouf, 2016;  Köppe, 2012; de Cortie et al, 2013 ). Thus questions relating to this (Question 4 and Question 5) have been included within ‘The  Starting Questions’. 

Another issue we identified is lack of communication (Köppe, 2012). We have not explicitly tackled this as we think it best that students  make this decision for themselves, but we hope that in organising a meeting prior to the assignment we provide the space for this  decision to be made. 

And very simply we found that students don’t know what type of a group worker they are (Colbeck et al, 2000), thus we have created a  quiz to provide some guidance here. This quiz is based on consultation theory (Moussa, 2021) and we believe it to be especially useful as collaboration is thought to be rooted in consultation (Goulet et al, 2003).

Developmental Justifications

However it is still important to keep in mind that although this is an educational tool, it can have benefits outside of pedagogy. These are  what we class as developmental justifications. In that it develops general skills which can be applicable outside of an academic  context. 

First of all the practice of doing group work, and specifically effective group work, allows a student to learn and apply a vast variety of  different soft skills which are useful in their general life but also are in demand within the labour market (Deming, 2017, Williams et al,  1991). These are including but not limited to collaboration skills, communication skills, decision making skills, conflict resolution skills,  critical thinking skills, leadership skills, project management skills, and group processing skills (Williams et al, 1991, Bentley & Warwick  [1], 2013; Bentley & Warwick [2], 2013; Thom, 2020). In addition to this group work exposes students to a pluralistic perspective and  helps them learn to reconcile and deal with multiple differing viewpoints (Williams et al, 199; Bentley & Warwick [2]). 

Furthermore in addition to these soft skills, by using self-reflection as a mechanism to foster effective group work we hope to improve  students’ academic self awareness and self esteem (Oostenbach, 2022). But taking this a step forward we hope to highlight to them the  usefulness of self reflection outside of academia and thus to provide them with a tool with which they are able to make more sustainable  and authentic choices moving forwards (Oostenbach, 2022).

Design Justifications

The very first thing we would like to address in terms of the design of this project is its scope. The project we made is a minimum viable  product whose primary audience is university students. This decision to make a minimum viable product was informed on the one hand by  time constraints, and on the other hand it was informed by the allowance of this model to receive much feedback early in the design  process (Ries, 2009). Additionally the decision to focus on students is informed by the fact that at the end of the day, students are  responsible for their own learning, this means that even without support from teachers or institutions, which has been noted to be more  reluctant to change, they are able to make the most of group work (Colbeck et al, 2000; Köppe, 2012; de Cortie et al, 2013). 

In keeping this focus on students in mind we made the decision to use student friendly language as much as possible; this is in order to  ensure that it is easily understandable and not confusing or off-putting to students (Vilceanu, 2015). In a similar light we tried ensure that  our tools were practical rather than overly theoretical such that they can immediately be used without having to have a deep knowledge  of theoretical background, which may seem irrelevant or unnecessary to students. For example rather than having students learn about  the colour theory from consulting (Moussa, 2021) we provide a quiz which distils the theory to only the relevant information. Additionally  in ‘The Starting Questions’ worksheet where questions may seem broad or ambiguous we provide examples to help guide students. 

An additional consideration we made was that perhaps students would not want to use all parts of our redesign, that’s why we have  incorporated a modular structure which allows students to use the different elements of the redesign to the extent they deem relevant (Sadiq  & Zamir, 2014). This is reflected in the worksheets being separate [albeit that the later worksheets have not yet been made], clear and  distinct questions within the worksheets which indicate in what manner they are relevant [through the icons in the corner of each question],  a separation between the quiz and the worksheet, and clearly separate sections for students, teachers, and institutions on the website. 

To put it succinctly we have attempted to maximise the perceived usefulness and ease of use of our redesign.

Another consideration which should be made is the use of technology within our redesign. This is in the sense of the use of a website  as the means through which to deliver our redesign. This decision was made in order to made in order to make the redesign as  accessible as possible while also being easily shareable. There is the issue that the use of technology might seem overly technical and  thus to minimise this we followed the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis et al, 1989). This is to say that we focused on the  ‘perceived usefulness’, by making immediately clear the relevance of our project on the website, and the ‘perceived ease of use’, by  creating distinct easily accessible sections.  

We also made the decision to make the active group part of our project, ‘The Starting Questions’ worksheet, non-technological [a  decision which shall follow for the other worksheets]. This is informed by research which shows that technology can be potentially  distracting in classrooms (Goundar, 2014) and thus to avoid this and encourage active discussion and reflection we choose to make the  reflection phase non-technological.

References

1. Bentley, Y., & Warwick, S. [1] (2013). An investigation into students’ perceptions of group assignments. 
2. Bentley, Y., & Warwick, S. [2] (2013). Students’ experience and perceptions of group assignments. Journal of Pedagogic Development, 3(3), 11-19. 3. Carr, P. B., & Walton, G. M. (2014). Cues of working together fuel intrinsic motivation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 169-184. 4. Colbeck, C. L., Campbell, S. E., & Bjorklund, S. A. (2000). Grouping in the dark: What college students learn from group projects. The Journal of Higher Education, 71(1),  60-83. 
3. Davis, F. D., Bagozzi, R. P., & Warshaw, P. R. (1989). User acceptance of computer technology: A comparison of two theoretical models. Management science, 35(8),  982-1003. 
4. de Cortie, T. H. O. M. A. S., Bosma, G., Broeckhuijsen, R., & Köppe, C. (2013). Learning patterns for group assignments-Part 2. In Proceedings of the 20th Pattern Languages  of Programs conference, PLoP (Vol. 13). 
5. Deming, D. J. (2017). The value of soft skills in the labor market. NBER Reporter, 4, 7-11.  
6. Goulet, L., Krentz, C., & Christiansen, H. (2003). Collaboration in education: The phenomenon and process of working together. Alberta journal of educational research, 49(4). 9. Goundar, S. (2014). The distraction of technology in the classroom. Journal of Education & Human Development, 3(1), 211-229. 
7. Johnson, R. T., & Johnson, D. W. (2008). Active learning: Cooperation in the classroom. The annual report of educational psychology in Japan, 47, 29-30. 11. Köppe, C. (2012). Learning patterns for group assignments: part 1. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (pp. 1-12). 12. LaBeouf, J. P., Griffith, J. C., & Roberts, D. L. (2016). Faculty and student issues with group work: What is problematic with college group assignments and why?. Journal of  Education and Human Development, 5(1), 13. 
8. Moussa, C. (2021, October 12). High-performing teams [Lecture]. College of Economics and Business, University of Amsterdam.  
9. Oostenbach, M. (2022, February 16). Follow your sun: Knowing yourself as the foundation of education [Lecture]. Interdepartmental honours faculty, Vrije Universiteit  Amsterdam.  
10. Ries, E. (2009). Minimum viable product: a guide. Startup lessons learned, 3, 1.  
11. Sadiq, S., & Zamir, S. (2014). Effectiveness of modular approach in teaching at university level. Journal of Education and Practice, 5(17), 103-109. 17. Thom, M. (2020). Are group assignments effective pedagogy or a waste of time? A review of the literature and implications for practice. Teaching Public Administration,  38(3), 257-269. 
12. Vilceanu, M. O. (2015). Using insights from learning journals to rewrite teaching and learning goals in student-friendly language. International Journal of Sociotechnology and  Knowledge Development (IJSKD), 7(1), 33-44. 
13. Williams, D. L., Beard, J. D., & Rymer, J. (1991). Team projects: Achieving their full potential. Journal of Marketing Education, 13(2), 45-53.