Developing and Delivering Your Collaborative Project

Module 3

EDGE Learning Outcomes

There are four desirable EDGE Learning Outcomes that will benefit our students both personally and professionally in the 21st century:

1. Intercultural interaction
2. Project collaboration
3. Distance collaboration
4. Digital skills

To concretize these outcomes for EDGEd courses, we recommend to our EDGEing faculty that they adapt one or more global learning outcomes (GLO) from the AAC&U global learning rubric to their course, include the GLOs in their syllabus, and then (with their partner) identify an EDGEd activity that would produce assessable work that would meet that GLO.

Global Learning Rubric

Global learning is a critical analysis of and an engagement with complex, interdependent global systems and legacies (such as natural, physical, social, cultural, economic, and political) and their implications for people’s lives and the earth’s sustainability.

Through global learning, students should:

• Become informed, open-minded, and responsible people who are attentive to diversity across the spectrum of differences.
• Seek to understand how their actions affect both local and global communities.
• Address the world’s most pressing and enduring issues collaboratively and equitably.

The Global Learning Rubric focuses on:

1. Global self-awareness
2. Perspective taking
3. Understanding cultural diversity
4. Personal and social responsibility
5. Global systems
6. Knowledge application

The Global Learning Rubric can be found on page 14 and on the Association of American Colleges and Universities web site http://www.aacu.org/value/

Importance of Student Collaboration vs. Shared Project

For students to gain global competency and intercultural competency, it is important that the project require students to act collaboratively as members of an international team. Helping students learn to work with other students is always challenging, and having them do so with students in different countries may be even more challenging. If we consider that part of our role as educators is to help prepare our students to be ready for global work, this sort of activity can provide an invaluable experience for students from all participating institutions.

Task design is important since many well-intentioned collaborative activities often end up not being collaborative at all. For example, if students are asked to co-write an essay, what often happens is that they divide the work up so that they are co-dependent, i.e. the final product depends on the various parts, but is not collaborative as each partner individually completes their part. Collaborative tasks must, therefore, have some degree of inter-dependence, e.g. completion depends on knowledge, information and/or artifacts that only peers have access to and that cannot be found on the Internet. Certainly as you and your partner design the collaborative task, you will need to keep in mind the global learning objective and its assessment.

Deliverables and Grading

Both partners need to agree on a collaborative project. You do not necessarily need to require the same deliverables nor do you need to use the same grading rubrics for your students, especially if your EDGE course is inter-disciplinary. While the GLOs may be the same for both courses, the learning objectives and the method you choose to measure the attainment of those learning objectives in each course may differ widely.

Course Module and Lesson Development

At the post-secondary level, having a lesson plan may not always be necessary; however, in an EDGE course, working things out in detail will save you time and streamline the flow of the class. Online teachers know that when facilitating an online discussion, staying on task and being well prepared is one of the keys to a successful virtual class. Furthermore, module plans can be tweaked and re-used in subsequent semesters and they will ease some of the initial nervousness when you embark on your first few sessions. Having clear lesson plans set out and available to students also helps them navigate the often unknown waters of online intercultural communication.

Provide Opportunity for Critical Reflection/Assessment

Assessment is a large component of any institutional course and needs to be defined up front and made transparent to students. While you and your partner may have different ways or methods of assessing your students, it is important to address these and to be aware of how you both intend to assess students. Be transparent with your differences in assessment by communicating this with both sets of students, for you can be certain they will discuss this amongst themselves.

Students may have a lot to say about the experience so provide the opportunity for them to do so while taking care to recognize that direct self-expression may not come easily to some students. This kind of reflection can be supported by weekly journaling or blogging, assigning a written reflection or conducting a virtual meeting at the close of the project to discuss lessons learned. Whatever you decide, critical reflection is an integral aspect to their learning about and engaging with the content from a global perspective. The insights that emerge will likely add to your own understanding of the course content and facilitate your assessment of their learning. Given the challenges associated with assessing intercultural competence, many educators (see O’Dowd 2010 in Guth & Helm 2010 in Resources) use portfolio assessment by which students reflect on their learning and provide examples (e.g. text from a forum or audio clips from a Skype recording) of how and when this learning took place.

Issues of Technology 

Not all colleges use a proprietary Learning Management System (LMS), such as Canvas, and if one is being used, partners may have different levels of comfort using it. Also, depending on your and your partner’s colleges’ policies, issues of access to the technology for both sets of students (where one cohort is not registered at the college) and support for those technologies may vary. For this reason, many EDGE courses use free, open-access applications such as Skype, Zoom, and Google Drive, but both partners need to check with their campus IT support to be certain that the tools they plan to use will not be problematic or even blocked.   

Another suggestion is that when there is a language imbalance, i.e. one group is made up of native speakers and the other foreign language speakers, it may be worth tipping the balance back to the foreign language speakers by using tools with which they are already familiar. In this way one cohort has a linguistic advantage, the other a technological one. Regardless, you will both need to determine and agree on what technologies you want to use for communication and collaboration purposes. Once again, remember that as teachers you are modeling collaborative online international communication for your students.

Test the Technology

Murphy’s Law seems to always surface when technology is involved when teaching, so be prepared. If embarking on a synchronous activity, go online at least 30 minutes ahead of schedule to make sure things are working as they should, and if at all possible, have someone from your tech support on hand to assist if required. Even if it works during testing, something could always go wrong, so make sure you always have a Plan B. If you will be using solely asynchronous communication, check that your assignments, if posted in an LMS for example, are accessible.  Check and double-check.   

Encourage students to point out problems (e.g. via email to you).  Also let students know that you are learning with and through them. Everybody—teachers, students and tech staff—are doing innovative, challenging things in an EDGE course. Everybody needs to be patient with one another and help out if things don’t go perfectly.

Expect the Unexpected

One of the truly fascinating aspects of Penn State EDGE courses is that the knowledge building that you are about to witness and be a part of will take unknown shape and form. Teachers need to be prepared to let plans take longer than expected if, for example, activities are leading to an interesting discussion or to let plans go if activities aren’t working. Where possible this flexibility can be built into the course syllabus, but constant communication between partner teachers is the only way to guarantee real flexibility.