Guidelines for building an online team

This guideline is to assist to form and build a healthy team which is a critical process to ensure students' learning process and experiences.  Learning collaboratively does not come naturally.  A healthy team will assist you to learn more and better with comfortable experiences and processes.  According from previous students' comments, students feel that they learn the most from their team mates and their peers.  It may be tedious to build a team; however, it will pay back.  It is recommended that you take time to build a healthy team and good team relationships.  If you do not pay attention to it, team work can be a painful learning experience.  The importance of collaborative learning is to focus both processes and results, rather than the results only.

Q: Why we integrate team work into our course?

A: Mikhail Bakhtin’s principle of dialogism suggests that new meaning can only be generated when two bodies occupy different spaces at the same time (Holquist 21). Bakhtin writes, “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (qtd. in Morson and Emerson 60). In other words, knowledge is constructed in the exchange of voices, not in the voices themselves but the space between them. Homework is too often
completed alone, late at night, not discussed in class or meaningfully commented on by the instructor (just one person, after all, facing classes of twenty, thirty, or more).(Kitsis, 2008).

  • Get to know each other professionally and socially as early as possible. 
  • Establish the team leadership
  • Have a good, practical, and doable team plan in early stage.
  • Identify your common team goals
  • Good collaborative planning can require extensive iteration and negotiation. Consultation with expert or instructor is also important to good planning processes.  Feel free to invite the instructor to participate your planning.
  • Do not wait until the last minute to conduct the team work.
  • Exchange various contact information, such as e-mail, home phone numbers, and work phone numbers etc.
  • A good team plan generally comes from consistently checking, updating, and revising the plan.
  • Be understanding, responsive, trustful, and caring to teammates
  • Value each teammate’s strengths and weaknesses
  • Build good social friendships
  • If one will be away from electronic contact, it is necessary to notify teammates.
  • Be concerned with the learning processes of your teammates
  • Showing how one person’s ideas connect to other’s ideas to help construct group understanding.
  • Use various media to communicate and exchange ideas.  A team NetForum is created for each team to exchange ideas and information.  Its use is not required, it’s available as a support tool.  Teams are encouraged to use some free electronic communication technologies available on the Internet.
  • Researches have shown some useful collaborative strategies.  They are proactive action, task versus procedural orientation, positive tone, rotating leadership, task goal clarity, role division, time management, nature of feedback, and frequent, sometimes intense bursts of interaction. The strategies are reinforcing of each other.  See below for each explanation:

  • Proactive action: Teams should exhibit individual initiative, volunteer for roles, and meet their commitments. Also they deal decisively with members who are perceived to be free-riders.

  • Task versus procedural orientation: Successful teams focus on task additional to empathetic.

  • Positive tone: Team members should express excitement and shower other members with compliments and encouragement. Additionally, they express how fortunate they are to have such a well-functioning team.  Even at the end, the team members should make explicit attempts to laud each other for excellent work.

  • Rotating leadership: Rotating Leadership can be an useful strategy rather than one person doing all the work.

  • Task goal clarity: When ambiguity occurs, do not hesitate to contact teammates rather than making their own assumptions

  • Role division: Ideal team relationship use roles so that they are able to reduce team interdependence to moderate levels rather than dividing work so that they could eliminate their interdependence.

  • Time management: A successful team explicitly discuses the assignment schedules, established milestones, monitored the milestones, and kept a close eye on time, reminding other members of impending deadlines.   Additionally, they are more aware of time zone differences and how to manage the global clock to reduce the "downtime" when no one was working on the common parts.

  • Nature of feedback: Team members give substantial feedback oriented toward improving the content of a fellow member's work.  The feedback frequently involved some content contributions to add to the work, as well as some organizing and editing comments.

  • Frequency and Pattern of Interaction: Team members are engaged in frequent communication, given substantive feedback on fellow members' work, and notified each other of their absences and whereabouts.  Frequent, and sometimes intense, bursts of interaction reinforce trust in successful teams.

This guideline is prepared by Chih-Hsiung Tu, Ph.D.