>
> This is great information. My biggest issue in my online classes are
> getting students to meet together in a synchronous environment. How do you
> manage this aspect of the online tRAT. Students biggest complain is I can't
> meet.
>
>
As I mentioned:

"One result I found occurring quickly in the RAP process. The students
would skip the simultaneous gathering portion and simply exchange their
answers and rationales asynchronously via email or IM. That does undermine
the give and take of the group discussion, but I decided that, if that's
how the group wanted to handle their work, that's fine. They are still
engaging with the materials."

I chock this up to "adaptions necessary for the online environment." Also,
it fits in with my general "don't fight what you can't effectively change
with properly incentivized rules" attitude. Many students take online
classes because they want to avoid scheduling. It's almost a
bait-and-switch to then tell them that they have to schedule. As Candice
noted, sometimes the teams just cannot meet. I understand the value of
group discussion give-and-take, but an online course is perhaps not the
best environment to practice that skill. For me, the engagement with the
material is more important. If that's happening (as noticed by the list of
participants, the answers they give, and the peer evaluations they submit
about each other), I'm happy with the result. In the "real world", a good
deal of group discussion occurs outside face-to-face meetings. Being able
to collaborate without real-time interaction is a valuable skill. Indeed,
we are doing it right now.

One process response could be to assign a discussion thread within the
group for the team RAT. That way you can capture within Blackboard the
asynchronous interaction between the students. You could even grade their
interactions (as I do on the discussion assignments which I will go into on
another installment).

My concern with that approach is that, if you offer that option, you pretty
much guarantee that no synchronous collaboration occurs. The students will
always take the easier way, and not sweating scheduling is always easier.

In the end, I went with set instructions to collaborate synchronously, with
the understanding that at some point the less dedicated or more
busy/stressed students would likely ignore that instruction. Teacher guide
learning; they can't mandate it.

Alex