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