Having just completed our first online group collaborative response process to the case study we were assigned amidst the pandemic shutting down Australia, schools shutting down, and so many of the cohort as active teachers moving their teaching from in person to online this seems an ideal time to reflect.
Having my ‘Group 2’ appear on the side bar in the Interact Learning Management System was helpful as a prompt to start but it was there for a couple of days before anyone posted anything. The first posts were mostly about how busy people were and how they were not caught up with the readings due to the transitions happening throughout the education industry. Some surface level conclusions were drawn by the time I discovered my group had been posting.
I was also intrigued by the wiki format available but felt that as a newer tool of greater potential complexity it made sense that most conversations were held in the discussion forum at first.
I contributed a reformatted combination of the information from the profiles of the persons in our case study with the information from the case study itself. This drew attention to some of the staff transistions that could be made to address some of the issues. However I firstly accidentally posted the body of my text in the description which messed up the forum aesthetics. Another student who had initiated the forum was able to delete and repost my content as I had intended it to be. I tried not to be too specific in pointing out the connections as they already aligned with the direction the group was taking and I didn’t want to be heavy handed in my communication. However I’m not certain that processing and posting the information in this way helped anyone but me.
Once we had a few comments and citations in the wiki one of the members transistioning to online learning suggested we just mush the best description of our idea and the list of citations together and leave it at that as she was time poor and couldn’t add much more. This was agreed to. I left a post inviting someone to put their hand up for the posting and this was taken on by another student the next day.
Two students did not turn up in the forum at all.
It did help to have some discourse about the case study but it would have helped to have more time with it and for people not to be making such large transitions in their life but I suppose this is the case for most times of crises and change.