5.2 Loosely Co-ordinated Groups

Supervisor time is expensive and may be squandered by duplicating advice. It is important to maximise supervisory resources without impairing the quality of the interaction.

---ooOoo---

In this bundle group projects are supervised not by meetings of individual groups with their supervisor, but by more formal meetings of multiple groups with a single staff member present.

The way it works is that overall staff time spent on supervising projects should reduce, time spent responding to technical (or other) queries outside the formal supervision period should not increase and students' requirements for advice/guidance outside scheduled sessions should reduce.

At each meeting, one representative of each group present makes a short report on the group's progress during the preceding period and its plans for near future. All present respond to this presentation and to any problems raised.

Meetings last one hour, with each group's presentation lasting 10-15 minutes (including Q&A/problem solving). Students take the role of Chair and Secretary for these meetings (on a rotating basis), with minutes and paper versions of the progress reports being circulated to all after the meeting.

Using this bundle makes staff/student interaction more focussed, and hence more useful to both parties. It gives students the experience of chairing meetings and of taking minutes, gives them practice in the presentation of results outside formally assessed forums and introduces the idea of group monitoring, additionally it encourages students' responsibility to the cohort as a whole.

This means that staff time is saved by combining the function of similar meetings, students learn to support each other's work and working practices and the amount of input a student gets from a supervisor is made more visible.

It works better if each group undertakes a different project, or each group undertaking the same project is placed in a different loose group (avoiding cross-fertilisation between instances of the same project). It works better if projects are similar enough that the students have some understanding of the work being undertaken, and the technical problems encountered in, other projects. It also works better for group projects, as meetings consisting of individuals each presenting their own projects would either run too long, or be too small to encourage interaction.

It doesn't work if students' preparation for the meeting consumes more effort than the benefits gained or if students do no work (despite warnings) and are absent from the meetings. It doesn't work if students come from different programmes, or are undertaking projects with a different weighting; leading to a proportionately different amount of effort being spent on preparation for the meeting.

---ooOoo---

So: appreciate that supervision does not have to be a one-to-one activity