Students are not fond of teamwork, especially when it’s online. That is one of the findings of my dissertation, which explores the relationship between online students’ interpersonal needs and interaction preference. Nine years have passed since I received my Ph.D., and this unfavorable feeling toward teamwork still seems to be present to a large extent for online students.

Both of the two online students invited to speak at our DePaul Online Teaching Series (DOTS) program stressed that they were not interested in building the so-called learning community or social network through any collaborative project. One of them pointed out that after contemplating the costs and benefits of conducting a group project, he decided to give it up. “That two points for the grade isn’t worth the pain of having to deal with a guy [the assigned team member] who had never returned my calls or e-mail,” M. J., a student from the School for New Learning, told us.

The fact that students are thinking about whether “it’s worth it or not” sends a strong signal to faculty and online-course designers. Is the teamwork required by the course worth the “extra” time and effort that students have to put in? The answer to this question depends on the goals and objectives of a course. As with all the other learning activities, the use of teamwork should be driven by the desired outcomes of a course. Rethink incorporating any team project if you don’t expect or cannot afford the time for students to meet the following objectives in a course:

• Multiple perspectives among students
• Team-building knowledge and skills
• Competency in technology-mediated communication
• An understanding of various processes of learning (or “no one right ‘path’ to the result”)
• Resolution of both cognitive conflict and affective conflict

I admire course quality standards that make collaborative learning an optional item rather than a required one, because as powerful as it is, this strategy might not be appropriate for every course or every discipline. But if you do find a strong match between the course goal and the teamwork activity, do it very seriously by giving it enough time, points, and support to make it “worth it” for the students.

I came across an article this month by Staggers, Garcia, and Nagelhout on “Teamwork through Team Building: Face-to-Face to Online,” in which the authors argue that “teamwork most successfully occurs after team building, and too often this team building is lacking in online environments.”   I think this is the exact reason why teamwork has become an oxymoron for many online courses: it has been thrown at the students without anything to prepare them for it or any guidance to support them (one online introduction isn’t enough).

Over the past ten years, I have been working with Dr. Pete Mikolaj, a professor from the School of Business at Indiana State University, to experiment with collaborative problem solving in the online environment. We’ve used his insurance and risk-management courses as the test bed to implement a number of strategies to engage students in a group project, which serves as the main outcome of the course. Among the various ideas we’ve tested, the following strategies were found to be very effective for online teamwork:

Heavy Weight on Teamwork

• Make the project weigh 50 percent of the total score or more (since it constitutes a major goal of course)

Heavy Weight on the Process of the Teamwork

• Give 50 percent weight to the process (involvement) of the project and 50 percent to the product (final report)
• Interim evaluation given about six weeks into project based solely on process (teamwork)

Frequent Progress Monitoring

• Weekly project log required from each team member
• A weekly team log is produced
• The log builds accountability and transparency

Clear Policy on Reward and Punishment

• Peer/self evaluation allows +/- 15 percent deviation from team grade to create individual grade
• Self-evaluation counts one third and peer evaluation counts two thirds
• Individuals can be fired from the team for nonperformance

Guidance from Faculty

• Weekly synchronous session with the instructor that primarily involves discussion of projects. Sessions are recorded and available for viewing throughout the term
• Sample project reports from prior classes are available from the first week of the semester

When it comes to online courses, the choice of teamwork is not “to do or not to do” but rather “to do it well or not to do it at all.”  So, before adding any teamwork into the learning activities, think twice about the “why,” and then (if it’s a good fit), work hard on the “how,” because that is the only way to make teamwork work.