Assessing Collaborative Efforts

Assessing Collaborative Efforts

According to Dr. Siemens, in the participative pedagogy, with collaboration and teamwork in curricular activities, the shit from an individual-based learning assessment model shifts to a collaborative-based learning assessment (Laureate Education, 2011).  Cooperative learningencompasses collaborative learning, peer tutoring, and other methods in which students work together in small groups to maximize their own and each other’s learning (Shinyi & Yu-Chuan, 2013).  In a collaborative learning community, students bring to the course their varying levels of skill and knowledge and become co-creators of erudition that might affect the instructor's fair and equitable assessment of learning.  Consequently, assessment will include feedback from online communities, community, peers’ assessment, and student self-assessment.

If a student does not want to network or collaborate in a learning community for an online course, the other members of the learning community might completethe missing task and report the incidence to the instructor.  The instructor might check with the student for the rationale of the behavior, or assign the student to another group.  In a learning management system, the instructor can access and assess on the number of time the students long on, hours spent, hours in-group related activities, and the number of posts students contributed.  Effective teams require both individual accountability of member contribution and mutual accountability of the overall result of the team’s effort (Oosterhof, Conrad, & Ely, 2008).  The unequal responsibility and workload among group might spur negative consequence for the team or individual.  The instructor must be transparent in assigning rubrics to the assigned work, and use fair, direct, and equitable marks, assessing from the stated outcome-based metrics. In an authentic context-based assessment, assessment becomes a teaching-based activity that provides and opportunity to give feedback and evaluate learners as well as educators (Laureate Education, 2008).  It is important to develop strategies to engage reluctant learners who might lack intrinsic motivation for active engagement in collaborative learning communities (Park, 2013) and establish extrinsic motivators by aligning with self-determination theory for integrated extrinsic motivation activities (Clara & Barbera, 2013).

References

Clara, M., & Barbera, E.  (2013).  Learning online: massive open online courses (MOOCs), connectivism, and cultural psychology.  Distance Education, 34(1), 129-136.  doi: 10.1080/01587919.2013.770428
Laureate Education, Inc.  (2008).  Assessment of Collaborative Learning.  Baltimore, MD:  Author
Oosterhof, A., Conrad, R., & Ely, D. P.  (2008).  Assessing learners online.  Upper Saddle Rive, NJ: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall
Park, S. W.  (2013).  The potential of web 2.0 tools to promote reading engagement in a general education course.  TechTrends, 57(2), 46-53
Shinyi, L., & Yu-Chuan, C. (2013).  Distributed cognition and its antecedents in the context of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL).  Asian Social Science, 9(7), 107-113.  doi: 10.5539/ass.v9n7p107