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To make more room for the Hard Problems, I won't bother to detail the many use cases which fit now well-established collaborative paradigms. Here are a few sample activities:
- Create a personal workspace with a digital repository, some public documents, and an blog on which any registered user can comment.
- Create a publicly accessible interest group. Joining the group gives shared access to a workspace including a discussion board, notifications, announcements, a calendar, and a wiki. The group can be dropped at any time.
- Create a by-invitation-only research project site including archived messages, chat room events, and video clips.
- Form personal contact lists from known users.
- Send a message to people who've indicated on their calendar that they're attending a certain event.
- See which public groups a person belongs to.
2. Memberships from external systems
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The remaining pedagogical use cases are all slavishly copied from Clay Fenlason's list of Georgia Tech Group and Course Requirements.
- "Capstone" experiencesextend across 1 or 2 semesters with groups of varying size, but typically around 4-5. These students will produce project deliverables of varying types (written and oral reports, software solutions, peer ratings, etc) as they move through different stages of the design and often work with customers external to the university.
- Problem-based learning: Several problems during a term are introduced to students who then may work in teams of 3-5 and need to pull together information from a variety of resources in order to fully address the problem. Student presentations of their work on the problems may be included.
- Group notetakers: Rotating student groups of up to 10 or so students take notes for a single course and produce editable public versions of those notes for the rest of the class.
- Video research projects: Teams of students from a single course perform a technical research project and document solutions via the production of a video.
- Distributed teaming for engineering design: Students from multiple campuses collaborate on teams for the purpose of creating design solutions to complex problems. Teams typically confined within one term but may be enrolled in multiple courses.
- Paired problem solution presentations: Students choose or are assigned a partner to work with on daily or weekly problem sets. One of these pairs is then randomly selected to present their attempt at a solution for one of the problems from the recently assigned set. The class discusses the problem.
- Vertically integrated project teams: These support large scale, complex, multi-year projects in engineering with perhaps a dozen students from sophomore through graduate level and from a variety of majors. A single student may participate in the project for 1 or more years but students enter and leave the team each term. External stakeholders may have significant roles to play.
- "Jigsaw": Students work in small groups to develop knowledge/expertise about a given topic and to determine effective ways of teaching this knowledge to others. These "expert groups" then break up and move to new "jigsaw groups." ( Each jigsaw group now consists of students who have developed expertise in different subtopics.) Each "expert" in the jigsaw group then assumes the role of teacher and instructs the other members of the jigsaw group about the subtopic.
- "Test-Taking Teams": Students work in teams to prepare for exams and then take the exam first individually and next as a group.
This collaborative learning process involves three steps: (1) the group studies for the exam together; (2) individuals take the exam; and (3) the group takes the exam (students rejoin their groups to reach a consensus on the answers and submit a group response to the test). Rationale: By working together to prepare for the exam, students help each other understand the content. Because each student first takes the test independently, this process emphasizes individual accountability. By retaking the test as a team, individual students benefit from the collective knowledge of the group. This technique is used for both short quizzes and tests for covering larger amounts of material--and since the group score is usually better than the individual scores, the technique is often used to demonstrate the value of collaborative learning. Individual grades are determined by using both individual test grades and group test grades. Scores are weighted (for example, two-thirds for individual plus one-third for group).
- "Feedback Teams"(Peer-Review, Peer Editing): Students critically review peer work (either in pairs or small groups) and provide feedback on each other's essays, reports, research papers. or projects. This works best when students are given guidance on what to look for (rubrics) and guidance on how to make constructive suggestions. Once feedback is exchanged, students take feedback into consideration and revise/prepare their final product. Typically students include their peer review forms when they submit their completed product to the instructor for evaluation.
4. Federating membership sources
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This extensive list has stayed within the confines of a large university (perhaps with some cooperating partners via Shibboleth). However, the combination of financial pressures, user expectations, cloud computing services, and increased cooperation among social networking hosts moves the problem of federated authorization beyond the LMS/CLE border. Solutions to these new challenges should play a part in solving many of the old ones as well.
- Open access to selected LMS/CLE resources via OAuth.
- Directly reference social or professional contact lists from the LMS/CLE.
- Securely host all or part of an LMS/CLE on Google Apps.
- And so on...