4 How to Be Successful
Lesley McCannell
Learning Objectives
By the time you complete this section, you will have
- Reviewed lessons learned from previous students about project success
- Listed the keys to success that you want to personally remember
Group Project – Lessons Learned
I’ve run this assignment or similar ones several times with students and thought I’d pass on some off the things that I’ve observed about successful teams and some comments that students have made.
- The quality of the group process correlates 100% with the quality of the group product. What does that mean – in order to grade the group process part of the assignment I review the discussion forums to see who is participating, how often and the quality of the participation. Without fail the groups that worked well with one another (e.g. careful planning, clearly assigning tasks and staying in touch, etc.) score much higher on the paper they submit.
- Expect to visit the course site a minimum of 3 times a week during the group project. It’s preferable to check in daily. Checking in means checking your discussion forum to see if anyone is waiting for a response from you.
- Don’t wait to take action – be the one who initiates the discussion – when you look at the marking rubric you’ll see that I look for “initiating discussion and ideas” when I’m grading your participation.
- Everyone has to read the entire assignment thoroughly to do your initial planning. The hardest part of this assignment is getting organized!
- If you want high quality research you need to coordinate the research that people do. The most successful teams would assign specific tasks to members and update each other mid-week. It didn’t seem to work as well when teams would say – “just go and see what you can find”. People would end up duplicating the work of others and that affects the quality of the research.
- Have the discussion about “who will write each deliverable early”. Sometimes that discussion never took place and everyone would wait to see if someone else would volunteer.
- Hitchhiking on your team members efforts is not tolerated. If a member is not performing address the situation early – ask them if they need help. If I notice that a team member is continually not contributing to the discussion and chats I will first contact them to see if something is preventing them from full participation. If they continue to not participate I will remove them from the team. If you plan to be a way for a few days you need to let your team know that.
