We've just finished our collaboration with the UW-Madison students. I actually liked how it worked. I thought my group had a very fair amount of work, maybe a little much towards the end, but overall it was very reasonable. I think this experience definitely depended on which group you were in. It seemed that other groups complained of an excess amount of work and unclear instructions, but my group's assignments were pretty straight-forward.
The first day when we met our group, we were given a pretty good idea of what the whole assignment would be like. This was very helpful, and it helped the whole process. We had a very similar amount of work each time, so I really knew what to expect. Sometimes it looked like a lot of work, but once I got started, it wasn't too bad.
Again, I can only speak for my own group, but I think this was a good experience overall. Either way, it was something new for them as well, and it was probably very beneficial to them as they study to become teachers.
I completely agree that the collaboration was a worthwhile experience. My group understood that we would have work to do in the regular class as well, so they didn't try to kill us with a bunch of assignments, and they didn't say we needed a certain number of words or pages either. This gave us some freedom in how to respond, and I think our posts ended up better and more thoughtful as a result. At the last meeting, they even said that they had showed our responses to some of their classmates, and they were apparently amazed by the quality of the responses. They also told us exactly what to expect on the first day, so we knew when we would need to check the website for our assignments. They didn't surprise us with anything, and they gave us ample time to respond. It was a good experience, and I hope any internet assignments I have in the future turn out the same.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I thought that the collaboration was a good experience, and our group did seem to have a fair amount of work. Towards the end it got to be a little too much work for me to balance, but overall the assignments were pretty straightforward.
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