Collaborative work can, at times, be difficult. Fortunately Office 365 provides us and our students with a suite of helpful tools that can enhance, capture and enable seamless real time collaborative activities both face to face and at a distance.

Faculty colleague Andrew Kennedy has kindly offered to share his experiences of using shared documents on Office 365 both to support student group assessments and also to facilitate active and engaging shared writing and proof reading activities. Full details below:

Several years ago I was working with L5 Early Childhood Studies students on a module in which they worked in small groups with students from a German university to produce posters for assessment. When I first had the idea I approached Chris Gillies from the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team to see how we could do this through Blackboard, and the short answer was that there was no easy way to do so.  Instead we used Google Slides to make the poster, with communication supported by email and Facebook; all groups absolutely refused to use Skype. The LJMU students reported enjoying being able to collaborate remotely in real time, and the project ran for a number of years.

The introduction of Canvas coincided with the revalidation of our programmes, and I was interested in broadening the kinds of assessment we were using.  One L5 module had two assessments, a group presentation and a supporting annotated bibliography.  Knowing the resistance that some students can present to group assessment, we made the bibliography an individually-assessed piece of work.  We decided that the group element would take the form of a 15-minute narrated PowerPoint presentation.

One principal challenge I have come across with group assessments is that more reluctant groups will find excuses for not working together (“we couldn’t find times to meet”, “X never showed up to meetings”, etc).  Another is the tendency for some groups to divide the task between them, each produce their own section, and then cobble it all together at the last minute.  It was at this point that I had the first of a series of conversations with Chris Gillies in TEL.  We established that we could get each group to create a shared PowerPoint presentation in Office 365, which was now available through Canvas.  In practice it took about an hour to explain and demonstrate the principle to the students and for them to create and test a shared document in their groups.  This included creating a slide and recording their voices over it.

The next question was how they would submit their work for marking and grading.  There were difficulties with the Turnitin tool which we normally use, but the Canvas Assignment Tool had the capacity to take files of the size that were emerging and proved easy to use for marking.  The nature of the task meant that a similarity check would in any case have been of little value.

In practice the presentations went well.  Students reported little difficulty with the method.  Many liked the flexibility which meant that  they could keep in touch even when some were in Liverpool and others in Ireland. They were able to see each other’s work as it progressed which meant, firstly, that they could maintain a uniform style and, secondly, they could track who was (and was not) making progress as planned.  The spread of marks was much as might be expected from that group; one pair failed, not because of the IT angle but because they did not do enough work, most especially not enough reading.  Significantly, student satisfaction as recorded in the module evaluation report came out above the mean for both School and Faculty.

Since working on this module in 2017-8 I have been teaching a L3 (Foundation Programme) module.  The group had been introduced to the Harvard Referencing System, but experience shows that many students take a long time to master this, so in preparation for the assignment I created a blank Word document in Office 365 which I shared with each of the eleven students in the group.  I then put it on the board and had them create a bibliography to which each student contributed three items in Harvard format.  The students were delighted to see their contributions appearing as they typed them, and by comparing each entry they were constantly proofreading and amending.  When the task was complete I went through each item in turn, and had very few corrections to make.  I have since been emphasising the benefits of shared proofreading.

More details on using Office 365 in LJMU can be found here.

For more information on using technology to enhance the student experience or course, curriculum and assessment design or if you are considering using Turnitin, Panopto, Visible Bodies or a none institutional technology for the first time please contact the Faculty team.

Created by Chris Gillies and Andrew Kennedy

Jigsaw image used is CC0 – no attribution required