A poster based on our study of collocated, face-to-face collaboration and online computer-mediated collaboration. Students learned collaboratively in lightweight teams

1. Learning in Distributed Lightweight Teams
Investigating team-based learning when teams are not collocated.
Stephen MacNeil, Celine Latulipe
UniversityofNorthCarolinaatCharlotte-CenterforTeachingandLearning
Motivation
Given the proliferation of online courses, in particular MOOCs, there is an urgent need to examine how to
engage students to improve retention rates. One solution is to support students through social interactions
and building a community of practice, where students could collaborate together in low-stakes tasks
(lightweight teams). Typically, by using flipped classroom models of teaching, students can be provided with
collaborative active-learning opportunities during class time. Is this type of learning model amenable to
students in distributed environments?
Our Experiment
In the experiment students learned to use a
semi-automatic espresso machine. There were four
parts (pretest, video watching, learning task, posttest).
The videos taught about espresso making and the
identical pre- and posttests determined the amount of
learning that occurred. The learning task simulated
discussion typically occurring in lightweight teams. In the
task students answered questions as a team or alone.
We used a between groups design with three conditions:
Individual: Participant do experiment alone (control).
Group Co-located: Participants are collocated and,
working together except during the pre- and posttests.
Group Distributed: Participants are in individual
experiment rooms, they working with other group
participants via Google+ Hangouts, except during the
pre- and posttests.
Results
Our results (figures 1,2 and 3) support previous
findings that team-based learning is beneficial for
student performance. The improvements typically
seen in collocated groups did not appear to extend
to distributed groups in our study. We believe that
some of this may be attributed to a lack of
familiarity with computer mediated
communication (google hangouts). A second
possibility is that our small sample size or the short
(1 hour) duration of our experiment may have
affected performance. Our future work
investigates these possibilities. .
References
1. Celine Latulipe, Bruce Long, Carlos Seminario. Structuring Flipped Classes with Lightweight Teams and Gamification. To appear
in Proceedings of SIGCSE 2015, 6 pages.
2. Mary Lou Maher, Celine Latulipe, Heather Lipford and Audrey Rorrer. Flipped Classroom Strategies for CS Education. To appear
in Proceedings of SIGCSE 2015, 6 pages.
Figure 1: This box-plot shows little variation between
students working independently and working in
distributed lightweight teams. Collocated lightweight
teams performed best as expected from observations in
previous publications [1].
Figure 2: These grouped bar-charts show participants
performance on the pre-test (pre), learning-task (mid),
post-test (post) and their performance gain from
pretest to posttest (gain).
Figure 3: The difference indicates the difference in
number of questions answered correctly.