Student Teams Play a Central Role

• Student teams are used throughout the Physics 100 Online course in order to:
  • Enhance social presence during the online learning experience, creating a learning community that supports students and reduces their sense of isolation and disconnection
  • Emulate authentic professional activity and provide collaborative work skills, preparing students for the demands and opportunities of actual work environments
  • Encourage collective problem solving. Teams give rise synergistically to insights and solutions that would not come about individually. While working in collaborative teams, students are more willing to take on the risk required to tackle complex, ill-structured, authentic problems because they have the support of others.
  • Make explicit multiple viewpoints. Conceptual growth comes from sharing perspectives and testing ideas with others - a negotiating process that modifies internal representations. Students experience and develop an appreciation for multiple perspectives when working with others.
  • Confront ineffective strategies and misconceptions. In collaborative work, team members draw out, confront, and discuss both misconceptions and ineffective strategies. Through collaborative participation, students also refine their knowledge through argumentation, structured controversy, peer teaching, and the sharing and testing of ideas and perspectives.
• Student teams involve 3 or 4 members of the course, and the same teams are maintained throughout the course. They are assigned a unique interaction space under the learning management system. This space allows teams to communicate and collaborate using asynchronous and synchronous discussion and document-sharing tools. (Note: The availability of specific tools is based on the robustness of the learning management system used.)
• Following general guidelines, each team negotiates a contract for participation and support on which all members must agree. This establishes the interaction, leadership rotation, roles and responsibilities, and division of labor principles and related assessment criteria under which the team will operate.
• Based on the negotiated contract, team members assess each other's contributions. Team members assign each other points based on this assessment. Assessments are conducted at all major project milestones.
• During the Team Project phase of each Unit team members exchange ideas, diagrams, calculations, and interpretations to analyze the team assignment; prepare a single report; and submit the report to the instructor for evaluation.