Assign collaborative documents in your online course to enhance student skills in problem-solving, teamwork, and engagement with course concepts. Choose a tool suited to your learning goals and provide students with clear instructions, interaction guidelines, and grading criteria.
5 Steps: Online Student Engagement
1. Choose the Right Tool
Carefully consider your course learning objectives when selecting the most effective tool to support collaborative document activities. For an application-level objective, you may assign student groups to complete case study on slides in an online PowerPoint. Or you may use Microsoft Whiteboard to facilitate a class-wide concept mapping session aimed at a less rigorous understanding-level objective.
Discover how Dana Fowler, Associate Professor in the College of Nursing, used editable Microsoft 365 documents to enhance engagement in her online course. Read about her experience and why she transitioned from ICON Discussions to collaborative documents.
2. Design for Student Interaction
Learning objectives also inform how you structure collaborative documents to reinforce student learning. Before sharing with students, include instructions to follow and questions to answer inside the collaborative document. This guides students, ensuring they remain focused on the stated learning objectives. When you know the destination, articulated by well-crafted learning objectives, it becomes easier to determine the steps students take to be successful.
The interaction guidelines you provide for students are another important ingredient for successful collaborative document activities. For example, what process do you recommend students follow when suggesting revisions to their group’s PowerPoint slide content? How do students resolve conflict or disagreement with groupmates? At the start of the semester ask students to discuss rules for respectful and constructive collaboration, and to define acceptable group roles (e.g.: facilitator, devil’s advocate, summarizer, etc.).
So far, we have discussed fundamental ingredients for successful planning of collaborative document activities - your choice of online tools, how you structure assigned collaborative documents, and providing time for the class to determine interaction guidelines. Next, let's consider how to facilitate and assess student contributions to collaborative documents.
3. Facilitate Student Collaboration
Collaborative documents can be designed to increase student engagement and motivation. But even a seemingly flawless course design can fall short if you, as the instructor, are absent during the semester. While clear and detailed instructions may point students in the right direction, how do you monitor student participation in online documents and guide their interactions?
Microsoft 365 tools (i.e.: Word, Excel, PowerPoint) include version history functionality that greatly assists with gauging student participation. You’ll be able to see all edits each student has made on all your assigned collaborative documents. You can go further to ensure equal participation by asking students to keep a log that includes self-assessments of the student’s contribution to their group. Microsoft 365 tools also provide commenting functionality, which allows you to monitor students and interact with them in real time. Collaborative documents can be quite useful during live online classes for this reason. You can monitor small group progress inside Zoom breakout rooms by reviewing real-time updates on their assigned PowerPoint slide. When assigning larger, multi-step activities, include periodic checkpoints where students report on their progress to the class and receive feedback on emerging questions.
Dana’s online course model shows examples of using collaborative online PowerPoint documents to facilitate case studies, discussions, and visual analysis learning activities.
4. Assess Student Contributions
Grading criteria for collaborative document assignments can be conveyed with a rubric that leaves room to assess individual student contributions, the overall quality of the group’s content, as well as peer evaluation scores aimed at gauging group dynamics. Students can evaluate each other using the rubric you provide in their peer review feedback at checkpoints of larger assignments. Collecting self and peer evaluations at the mid-point of a collaborative project gives you the opportunity to identify struggling groups and intervene as needed.
5. Address Technical Questions and Issues
What happens if one of your students is having trouble using the online tool you’ve selected? Have a plan if technical issues arise so students aren’t distracted from course concepts by the tool you’ve assigned. Luckily you and your students have the support of Information Technology Services Help Desk to work through problems using any of the university’s licensed Microsoft 365 tools.
Take the next step: Talk with DOE to learn more about integrating a new idea or approach to teaching and learning in the online classroom.