Team/Group projects
It is a truth universally acknowledged by employers and professional bodies alike that an element of group work in a practical subject like Computer Science is A Good Thing. Yet group work sometimes sits uneasily in an environment where individual achievement is prized and collaborative activity (of the variety labelled "academic misconduct") is deplored.
"Group work" is the name given to a variety of projects in which groups of students collaborate to achieve a single goal. It manifests itself in laboratory work (often involving pairs of students working on small laboratory-based exercises), in so-called team projects (involving a large cohort of students divided into groups of at least three engaged in collaborative activity, often the construction of some artefact), and in places where groups of students collaborate to work on an individual project of a scale that they could not have attempted individually (often, a final-year or postgraduate activity).
Group work is valued within degree programmes, not only for its intrinsic learning goals, but also because it is perceived to inculcate in the participants an awareness of the needs, difficulties, opportunities and complexities of an activity essential to the professional engineer in the computing discipline. Conversely, although group work often has a large profile within a degree programme, the marks that it attracts may be a small proportion of a student's final classification, so students and staff have to balance effort against the potential reward.
As soon as group or team working is required in a project, then working with others?the technical and personal collaboration necessary to build a joint product?cannot be avoided. This means that students will expect support in this way of working.
Supervisors (and institutions) vary in their approach to this requirement, from the very prescriptive ways to manage process provided by continuous quality process documentation to the laissez-faire "this is what group working is, you must expect problems, just get on and do it" [see also 5.1 Characterising Supervisor Input]. Students may also be empowered with mechanisms to address internal group problems which do not require supervisor intervention [for example, see 8.5 Red Card/Yellow Card].
Whatever approach (in whatever degree) is taken, the simple fact of the way in which the students are working (in groups) adds a dimension which is quite absent from typical forms of learning in the rest of the curriculum ? that is on coursework or on individual projects.
This involves devising activities that are suitable for groups of students to complete in the time available, while still achieving the educational objectives. The work typically involves exposing students to as much of the product lifecycle as possible, yet remaining small enough to allow students both to encounter challenges and have time to reflect on their achievements (or otherwise) at the end of the activity [see section seven Reflection, especially 7.7 Cherish it]. The activity must sub-divide to enable a division of the task between the members of a group. Where a cohort is large, there will typically be many groups attempting the same task, which must therefore be capable of solution in a variety of ways to avoid excessive duplication between groups.
A desire for realism may encourage the supervisor to consider introducing some element of "real world" input. This can be a mixed blessing: the obvious advantage of exposing students to a problem that they might have tackled had they been in employment is to be welcomed, but input from companies (say) is necessarily circumscribed by real commercial constraints. This might mean that the scale or scope of the project proposed, or the outcomes expected (i.e. a robust commercial quality product) are unrealistic [See 4.2 "I'd like to do that"]. Other problems can occur in the student-industry interaction. For example, a response to a student question from an external "client" or "manager" is often not as prompt nor as detailed as a local supervisor might give. All of these problems can be useful educational experiences, of course, assuming that there is an opportunity for appropriate reflection and debriefing. In practice, real world input is often most effective when moderated by someone in close contact with the students tackling the project [see 3.3 Creating a real company ].
The key problem here is to attempt to allocate students to groups so that each group has an equal chance of doing well. Those who have read Belbin's (Belbin, 1981) work on the structure of teams will appreciate that the aim is to form teams that have a good balance of skills; this is not necessarily the same as a good balance of academic ability. Students easily perceive that allocations are unfair, typically because they perceive one team as having more academically able students than another. Staff, however, perceive that this can be unfair for different reasons ? a team with the most academically able students in it may be one with too many strong characters to form an effective and harmonious team. It has been shown (Thorn, 1998) that when allowed to self-select, students do not work to maximise the skill set of the group for the task in hand, but instead choose to work with their friends.
Once the allocations are done, all groups need an initialisation strategy to get them going. The issue here is whether to let the students simply get on with the task set (which may be too much to expect of less mature students), and hope either that a natural leader will emerge to take control, or appoint someone with the specific task of leading the group. Another, less intrusive method is to require that the team have named roles, but let them decide (by whatever mechanism they choose) who is to take on which role. If tasks are specifically allocated, they may rotate between members of the team or be negotiated with the supervisor; an election or job application process may also take place. Whatever your choice, it is helpful to students if you tell them which initialisation strategy you are adopting. 3.2 Roles in groups has more details.
The issues surrounding the supervision of group projects can be clustered around the role of staff, the activities of students, and a small number of special circumstances. Where a large cohort is engaged in a group project it is likely that several staff will need to be involved in supervising the cohort. Where different staff have different skills, experiences and approaches, it can be difficult to get all the staff to give advice in a consistent way. Recognising and using those different skills, for example by allocating staff to a functional role rather than to a group of students, can mitigate this. [See also: 2.12, Staff deployment, 4.1 Me and my shadow and 5.1 Characterising Supervisor Input].
Whatever role is allocated to staff, staff need to check that every student within a group is making a contribution, and that the group as a whole has the opportunity to reflect on the process as it proceeds. Occasionally a student will become isolated from the rest of the group. Sometimes this is because they think they can complete the task on their own (which may be true, but that's not the point of the exercise), sometimes this is because their personality or culture makes it difficult for them to interact effectively with their peers, or sometimes it happens that other team members become unavailable (for example, through illness) [See also section five Stuff Happens]. Supervisors need to be aware of these problems and offer appropriate encouragement; they should also make sure that groups are not so small that they become individuals [Although see : 9.1 Going solo].
Of all the issues surrounding group work, that of assessment is perhaps the most problematical because it is the issue on which students, staff, institutions, professional bodies and external examiners alike have the strongest views.
It must be a prerequisite that it is acceptable that marks awarded for group activity can be counted towards the degree classification of individual students. The extent to which they count varies: 5% would be unexceptional, more than 20% may require considerable discussion. It is common for students to engage in group activity, but nevertheless be assessed, at least in part, by an individual assessment reflecting on the experience [see also 6.1 Use Peer Assessment].
Where identical marks are given to individuals for the work of a group, it is often for the construction of an artefact, but this raises the issue of whether all students made an equal contribution to the activity. This can be addressed by moderating the marks awarded for the group activity by student input, allowing a group of students to agree that individuals made greater or lesser contributions to the activity. Getting the students to agree, or where they cannot agree, having a clear method of resolution, is key [See also 2.9(ii) Group assessment]. Where a group project has involved industrial input, an industrial contribution to the assessment may be appropriate. Here, a shared understanding between the academic and industrial views is essential. Industrial input in the form of a prize may mitigate potential differences between academic and industrial views [See also 2.8 Motivation].
At the end of the project, the participants should have an awareness of the needs, difficulties, opportunities and complexities of working as a group. If you are the supervisor, you need to know whether this has happened. You also need to know whether the activity was too easy (so that students have not experienced enough of the problems), too challenging (so that students have been over-occupied with too limited a range of activities) or just right.
If the project was just right, students will feel that they have been challenged to face problems, but have been able to overcome them, and that they gained understanding and useful experience. You will know all this by having been involved in the project, by soliciting feedback from students and colleagues, and engaging in your own reflective activity. More negatively, some of your students may have hated the group work experience, so reflection, and getting them to realise that they may have learned something from the experience, is important. At its most positive, your students will obtain jobs by being able to articulate their experiences of group work in an interview, and this seems to be important to students (and potential employers) at the present time [See also 7.10 "If I had my time again"].
Belbin, R. M. (1981) Management teams: why they succeed or fail, Heinemann.
Thorn, K. (1998) In Projects in the Computing Curriculum (Eds, Holcombe, M., Stratton, A., Fincher, S. and Griffiths, G.) Springer-Verlag, London, pp. 217-224.