Trusting the Group Dynamic in Asynchronous Instruction

By Daniel Holmes (Lecturer, Department of English)

With Spring 2021 syllabusing drawing nearer, I’ve been reflecting on the ways assignments designed for in-person synchronous classes translated to asynchronous virtual learning over the course of the Fall 2020 semester. The most challenging adjustment I faced—and the one that shed the most light on the ways a new modality offered unexpected instructional possibilities—came as I attempted to reorient a multi-part collaborative project to this new context. Despite some initial challenges in facilitating communication between students, I ultimately came away from the experience with a greater conviction that these partnerships were an especially important means for students to meaningfully engage with course content in our virtual learning environment.

The Collaborative Project

One of the most important assignments in a 3000-level Editing course I teach is a semester-long project that asks students to collaborate on the writing, editing, and publication of an online journal. On one hand, this assignment—which asks students to take turns serving as writers and editors—seems a perfect fit for the online modality. After all, most of the editing I ask them to do is performed and submitted digitally, and one of my goals has always been for students to develop competence collaborating in a virtual context.

On the other hand, our in-person class meetings have historically provided an important opportunity for students to discuss nuanced problems they are encountering with the project or touch base with uncommunicative partners. I was trepidatious about leaving them to depend so heavily on one another when I’d already perceived some incongruity in student responsiveness in the digital format. I didn’t want conscientious students to be negatively impacted by peers less able to meet deadlines or engage in timely correspondence.

Concerns About Lack of Communication

A few weeks into the semester, I had cause for concern. A higher-than-usual number of students complained that their partners were unresponsive. I intervened in group communications (sending reminders and queries via email, mostly) more than I normally would to keep everyone on track. In one case, I had to edit and publish a student’s article myself, because their partner neglected to do so. None of this was catastrophic, but I soon doubted my ability to properly facilitate this rather complicated and extensive project without bringing everyone together in person.

Part of the problem, I soon learned, was that the asynchronous format slowed student response time as they made their way through iCollege modules designed to teach them how to navigate the class as well as absorb course content. The result was a bumpier-than-usual transition into student partnerships that concerned me as the semester started to gain its momentum.

In response, I looked forward to my upcoming Spring section of the course and planned adjustments. I resolved to pull back on the level of autonomy I gave groups in their collaborations, so students would have more independence from one another in completing their assignments. This would sacrifice some of the collaborative problem-solving I wanted them to enact, but would retain most of the skill-building work that I believe lends this project its pertinence.

Small problems persisted as they often do with large group projects, but there were fewer crises requiring my intervention as the semester progressed. Still, lacking consistent face-to-face responses and cues from my students, I assumed that enough of them had had rocky partnerships to necessitate a significant overhaul in the assignment’s design for future online-only sections of the course.

However, nearer the end of the term I noticed the students’ journal was coming together rather well. There were differences from the work submitted in previous semesters, but the overall quality was about the same, with different emphases. For instance, student articles had less variety in topic, probably because they had fewer class interactions to respond to, but the digital components of their work—line editing, formatting, and image editing in particular—tended to be stronger.

Student Reactions to Online Collaboration

After completing the journal project, I asked students to choose a response in an iCollege survey to help me ascertain how it all went. The options I provided were:

A) It’s best to split the class into editors and writers for each issue like we did this semester. Despite occasional communication issues, I think it’s important that we were able to interact with one another while performing different roles in the editorial process.

B) It was difficult to keep up with partners this semester without meeting in person. I think it would be better if everyone served as writers for the first half of the semester, then moved on to editing and publishing each other’s drafts in one big issue. This way, our work would be more independent and miscommunication between partners might be less likely to get in the way of individual progress.

I expected the responses to be divided, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that an overwhelming majority of respondents chose the first option. This was gratifying both because it affirmed my ability to approach the project in the manner I thought most beneficial and because it told me that a lack of positive feedback in the middle of the semester did not equate to confusion or frustration on the parts of students.

Looking Ahead to Next Time

I plan to make some adjustments up front to help students transition more smoothly into this assignment, but the experience has taught me that an important part of navigating group work in the virtual classroom is trusting students to negotiate the neutral space occupied by their collaborations, even when my instinct as an instructor is to preemptively smooth every potential bump in the road with calculated prescriptions.

After conducting an elaborate group project in a fully online course for the first time this semester, here are my takeaways:

Results

For group work, student communications with groups/partners at the start of the semester were less consistent in the asynchronous format, causing more missed deadlines than usual. Some students also took a bit longer to fully grasp the expectations of the assignment.
After a few weeks, students did better a better job of engaging with their partners and meeting deadlines.
In the end, the work students produced virtually for their group editing project was similar in quality to that of past semesters with in-person modalities, with different strengths and weaknesses from what I’d come to regard as normal for this assignment.
Students’ end-of-semester tests and reflections showed a degree of proficiency with course material similar to that of past synchronous sections I’ve taught.

Takeaways

Going forward, I’ll prepare for students in asynchronous classes to take a bit longer to adapt to the expectations and format of a the collaborative assignment. More low-stakes assignments early in the project can provide opportunities for students to get acclimated without significant penalties for missed deadlines.
It’s important to be flexible and supportive of student needs in asynchronous classes; this flexibility and support are especially important when problems arise as a result of miscommunication within student partnerships.
Virtual learning environments tend to decentralize instruction. This increases rather than lessens the importance of collaborative learning, because these partnerships help to engage students in particular nexuses of shared practice and knowledge.
Student partnerships in online, asynchronous instruction often need different kinds of time and space to develop. As instructors, we need to trust the process: if good work is being submitted on time, students are likely taking a more independently-driven approach to their learning and collaborations.