Sarah Honeychurch, University of Glasgow. Based on Aronson’s jigsaw classroom learning design but converted to online learning in Higher Ed. The jigsaw model was made to tackle the problems of how to get desegregated students working together – the answer was to make them depend on one another. The had to depend on other students to provide them with the knowledge they needed to complete the task – students teaching students. In the model Aronson split the class into groups, with each group researching different topics of one overall topic and to prepare a presentation to share with the rest – which made the work even better as they saw more of a purpose in it as it has a clear end user. Students are then “tested” on what they’ve learnt by the fellow students.
In this example at University of Glasgow, students were grouped into 15s, and each 15 split into 3 groups of 5 A, B and C- randomly. Each A, B and C group had their own wiki space on the VLE (Moodle) to build up their research and prepare it to feedback/present to the rest of their group. Each week a tutorial topic was posted in the VLE, with sub topics and questions to the whole cohort.
My question, to the courses I support, is whether the collaborative work we set lends itself to this idea and could we employ it here. I wold say that we probably wouldn’t use a wiki, but let students use their own way to compile the information, such a Google Docs as the more technology you introduce to learn the more they won’t use it. I guess the other thing is we often ask the students to write reports in an online group, so there is the next stage would be making sure the three parts of research lie side by side, rather than one being dependent on the other so perhaps the question would be on the same topic, but in different contexts eg an analysis of the marketing strategy of pepsi in 3 different countries, compare and contrast, etc
This could be used for online induction to build up critical friendship groups and an understanding of how students can learn from each other using CMC.
Advertisement
