Cases: Online Political Collaboration - Peter Haeusler

Keywords
Online projects; online collaboration; online group tasks; assessment feedback; undergraduate education

Teams collaborate online to form groups and complete assessable tasks.

Click on the microphone to hear the entire case study or select relevant sections from the text below. [AUDIO TRANSCRIPT]

Peter Haeusler is a Lecturer in Politics and Policy in the School of Social and International Studies in the Faculty of Arts. His project as a 2003 Online Teaching and Learning Fellow focussed on using Deakin Studies Online (DSO) to guide students in their overall learning experience and facilitate the development and effective management of their major case studies.

A particular challenge Peter faced was balancing the ‘order and freedom’ of the online projects for students, especially in terms of building compulsion (or not) into the assessment guidelines .

The online tasks described by Peter covered the development of online groups, of annotated references and the submission of an executive summary as a team and Peter outlines his use of the tools available to build collaboration, timeliness and to facilitate effective feedback. Peter’s experiences will be of particular interest to anyone thinking about facilitating collaboration and group tasks online.
Overall, Peter had both a challenging and worthwhile experience with DSO, to quote from his summary of his project:

“It [DSO] enables timely, effective guidance of student learning during semester and the realization of assessment practices aimed at deeper, qualitative learning and maintaining the integrity and rigor of academic requirement”

In relation to this Peter goes on to talk in more detail about how these were achieved . He adds to this by developing more on the theme of time management, teamwork and the achievement of students in the course.

In terms of DSO, Peter reflects on the potential of Deakin Studies Online as a tool for project management, especially in the structuring of their learning experience through the hurdle tasks inherent in his project . Questions about the technology and workload came to the fore and Peter’s experience points to learners still not being wholly comfortable with the online tools, especially when offering critical assessments of their groups work.

Peter was pleased to find that students accessed DSO on quite a regular basis and in this section of the interview talks about how students used the facilities and felt about them.

Finally, looking to the future, Peter talks about his new approaches to structuring discussion , making it a more integral part of the program and increasing the breadth of areas the students look into in their case studies.