Learning in workgroups

Active learning and PBL
1. Within the very well-known active-learning paradigm, the project-based learning approach represents one of the key strategies to be developed in order to encourage students autonomy within attractive and real-world challenging situations.
  1. In order to guarantee that the students get an adequate level of competences acquisition, the application of the knowledge in real situations thanks to well-defined and adapted projects is necessary.
  2. Project-based learning is a well-known methodology to facilitate knowledge and competences acquisition.
Working groups
1. This approach usually requires the constitution of group of students learning and working together in order to achieve the project goals.
2. Commonly, students are tempted to decompose the project in smaller parts to be distributed among the group members in order to work "more efficiently" during the project development.
3. Unfortunately, even if the decomposition activity itself requires mastering a global context knowledge as well as applying important project management, communication and negotiation competences, if the decomposition is done very early in the project or at a very high level, the knowledge and the competences supposed to be acquired by the group members during the project development will probably be partitioned, unbalanced and heterogeneous.
Working modes
1. Cooperative
  1. In this mode, each group member develops specific activities required for achieving the global group goals. This mode is usually very efficient as each participant concentrates on performing well individual tasks without being concerned about the other group members activities. Nevertheless, if external or internal events changing the normal sequence of members tasks occur, the group could need time to react and could need high-level reorganization plans to cope with these unexpected changes. Moreover, a reduced space of tasks to be accomplished could also mean a reduced champ of knowledge to be applied.
2. Collaborative
  1. In opposition, in the "collaborative" mode, the members are not only concerned about individual tasks but also about the achievement of the global group goals. In this mode, the users collaborate by continuously participating not only on individual task achievements, but also in global task monitoring. In this way, individual members can adapt their tasks in order to cope with external or internal events occurrence. They can also perform additional tasks in order to help the other members to achieve their goals. This autonomous and active role will ask from the students a higher level of knowledge and competences application.
Design of projects for learning
1. The design of project-based learning courses requires to carefully decide which working group model will be proposed to be followed by the group members.
2. If the cooperative mode is selected, higher efforts are expected from the instructor, in particular to help the students to decompose the project and to continuously monitor their individual achievements.
3. If the collaborative mode is selected, the instructor efforts are more intended to promote the students autonomy while continuously monitoring the global group achievement. In both cases, the design of the adequate project subject and goals will be the more crucial phase of the course design.
4. In further articles, several key elements of the collaborative learning approach will be presented, including design guidelines, case studies and available tools. Several external references and use cases will also be collected and presented.

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Learning in workgroups

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	Created by Ernesto Exposito over 9 years ago