Week 8

Working collaboratively online has allowed online learning to be taken to the next step. Over the years I have taken many online classes and working together with other students online has brought the classes together even though the students can’t be seen face to face with each other. I think working collaboratively can be both a good and bad thing. When you have good heard-working class mates then of course it is a good thing because everything goes smoothly and presents nicely. On the other hand, it can also be a negative thing when you end up with group members who don’t put forth their part of participation to the project. I have also been in situations like the class presentation where the entire class contributes to the entire assignment.

During high school I took many online classes through what we called NCVPS, or North Carolina Virtual Public Schools. For a couple of the class vocabulary was a weekly thing. The teachers would arrange a document with tables for the students to fill up. Each vocabulary word was listed on the left, and to the right there were places for us to define the word, use it in a sentence, and other things contributing to the word itself. As for me and my classmates we were to pick out a certain number of words and contribute to the assignment. The good thing was, was when we contributed to our part, we were not penalized for the empty slots or the students who didn’t do it. During my first semester here at LR, I was first introduced to Google Drive. In this class the teacher always depended on us to use Google Drive for almost every assignment we had. I think collaborative learning can be a great advancement with online learning. Although, it is nice to see people think for themselves with their assignments, contributing to an assignment collaboratively lets each of the students get to know the other class mates a little better. We can also learn from each other based on how the other students contribute their work to the assignment.

Working collaborative learning can be seen eve in the public school system. My mom is a teacher and a lot of them times the principal or whoever sends it out will put out a document for all the faculty to contribute to and resubmit so everyone can see the contribution to the file. Even in their server they can all work collaboratively in the files pertaining to their student’s information. It is something that can be used in very beneficially so not all the work is left to one person.