 Good afternoon, this is the afternoon session, the beginning of the afternoon session on day 5 in the QEE workshop. And this session is going to be about group projects, we will do some will consider various aspects of a group project for the next 45 minutes to an hour and then you will proceed to the lab where you will actually create some group projects using some of the recommendations. I am just going to flash this slide for a few seconds because you have seen it a few times earlier this morning yesterday and so on. This just shows the path of where you have come in the last two months. The different pieces, objectives, assessment tools, the alignment yesterday where you did using peer review, creation of these strategies and then earlier today this morning you use the learning objective strategies and assessment, you check the alignment and you integrated it all into creation of a lesson plan. So, there is some amount of integration that you will be doing even with the group projects and when you create your own projects we will see how that comes about. So, group projects is something that I am sure all of you are familiar with, you have done it. So, let us just do a quick warm up poll. This is on a view poll and the question is what percent of participants who are present in the session right now in your respective centers have assigned group projects for students at least one in the past year. So, what I would like the participants to do is just to say whether you have implemented group projects or not you can raise your hand and the center coordinator has to count and calculate a rough percentage and let us know in your center how many participants have actually how many instructors have implemented group projects. So, we will do this on the view poll, you can start raising your hands counting, polling and so on. So, what it seems from the poll is that about 14 centers say that more than 80 percent of the instructors there have given group projects and another 10 centers also say that 50 to 80 percent of the instructors have used group projects. So, this shows that there is a large number of people who have actually used and this is exactly as expected because in engineering colleges group projects have become quite common especially in the third and fourth years where students do it either as part of a course or as part of a seminar and so on. There is one more small point I want to make here this kind of a poll question if you recall from your peer instruction homework is a survey question. So, occasionally it is useful to get you data from the participants or students if you want to get a quick idea of who is at what level who has done something who is familiar with something you can use this is exactly a peer instruction survey type of question that you might have written in one of your homeworks. So, let us move on with the group projects. So, while you are all familiar with the group projects and you have implemented it one what we need to do is look a lot deeper into the group projects because there are several questions here for which we need answers we may have some answers for some questions, but we need to discuss some of these a lot more. For example, what are the benefits of group projects? I think many of you do have an idea of why we give group projects, but there are some specific benefits that are recommended from education research for which group projects are particularly useful. And with benefits come the challenges and the concerns how to address these challenges, then the conditions under which group projects are actually useful. So, what topics are suitable then how do you go about designing the format, can you use technology, maybe your students can use technology and if you use technology what purpose will you use it for and finally, how to assess your questions. So, there is a series of questions like this which we want to discuss more deeper about group projects and we will look at some recommendations on each of these counts and use those in creation of our own group projects. So, given that the learning objectives of this session are that by the end of the session you will be able to list both the benefits and the challenges and hopefully be able to identify some ways of addressing the challenges. You will be able to describe and again hopefully implement some effective practices while designing your own group projects, you will be able to identify and use relevant technology and also use rubrics which are a assessment technique that we will discuss at the end to assess the group projects. And later in the lab you will actually design a group project using technology tools which has all these features alright. So, let us do an activity next. So, this is a think-per-share activity and this will have all three phases and the three phases have questions which are linked to each other. So, you really have to do the previous question to get to the next question but they are not identically. So, the first thing phase where you work individually what you need to do is list one benefit and one challenge from your perspective of assigning group projects to your students. So, this is I do not mean in general or what you have heard, but for your own students in your classes in your courses list one benefit and one challenge ok. Let us go to the pair phase now. There are five minutes for this activity because there are a couple of things you have to do. First share with your partner the benefit and the challenge that you identified and let them share theirs. You can just discuss it, see whether you agree with the benefits, whether you think that their challenge is actually the same as your challenge. And then together come up with one way to address the easier of the two challenges. So, you can decide which of these two challenges is easier. Come up with one way to address it and if you have finished coming up with one possible solution to address the easier challenge then try to tackle the other challenge also. I need to remind you this is the pair phase. So, you have to discuss these questions with your neighbor the questions that are there on the slide ok. Share phase before I go to the share phase I have to remind you that this is a think pair share activity which means there is discussion that is expected. We can actually see all of you in the in our viewers and cameras. So, whether you are discussing or whether you are sitting and watching we know exactly what is happening and I really encourage all of you to talk to each other discuss and do this activity and we go to the share phase now ok. Share phase the entire center has to work together. So, each of you would have identified some benefits and challenges and ways of addressing them. So, weigh the benefits and challenges of group projects. You can even ask the question is it worth doing group projects and then identify one best practice to be effective. Coordinators please share one best practice from your center best practice means given that these are the benefits, but these are the challenges what should I do so that the group project is actually effective. There is no clear answer is best is a group project good or bad because there are some benefits and there are some challenges. So, identify some best practices and then share one of those ok. So, many of you have actually written good suggestions of formation of the group such as mingling the top students with average students and also other suggestions like you know get the assessment through some collaborative tool so that we can find the various identify various aspects of who has done what and so on. So, many good ideas of the best practices have been shared on the chat and what we will do now is we will talk about one example in which is from a course that I teach which is computer networking and try to analyze what are the benefits of the group project in this context. So, the group project that I gave was to say that design a wireless local area network for a typical academic building ok. So, just think of the building in which you are and assume that suppose you are teaching a computer networking course you want the students to come up with the network for the entire building so that laptops with Wi-Fi can be used anywhere. So, the project involves students to identify all the hardware and software required and also to give a bill of materials for the entire setup basically the students not only have to design the topology they also have to go and find out what are the actual products that are there for installing this network and what could be the cost of such a network right. So, this is typically you would say about so one aspect of group projects is deciding how many students will work together on such a project right. So, how will you first of all decide for this project how many students to be assigned to the project. So, this project I would say benefits from three students to a group because there are three different aspects which they can rotate around and all of them can together learn all the aspects of the computer networking in this project. So, typically for most projects you would have the smallest group size of course is two where you would have at least two students, but most group projects we do not have more than four or five is the largest size of a group project that we would typically envisage. So, three is generally a decent number and let us look at some benefits so given that this is the example let us look at some benefits and how the benefits are realized in this example. So, for example here you find that the benefits that are being listed are higher order thinking skills, need to connect and use various pieces of existing knowledge, may need to learn new knowledge and refine understanding through discussion and application. So, if you think of the exercise or the project of designing a wireless network you find that the higher order thinking skill is engaged when you are asking the students to analyze or when we are asking the students to evaluate whether their design is optimized for performance or for mobility or for cost. So, that forces them at least up to the evaluate level so when you look at the need to connect and use various pieces of existing knowledge again in this project they would have learnt several things differently in some they would have learnt in the physical layer, some they would have learnt in the MAC layer, some they would have learnt in the network layer. So, all of these pieces they need to connect in order to come up with a scheme for their network design. They may also learnt need to learn new knowledge because one of the things that was not covered in the course are the actual products that are available in the market and what is the cost of those products. So, that is new knowledge that they have to learn on their own and then they would refine their understanding through application. Further benefits on the real world problem solving that is actually fairly obvious with the current example that we talked about because it is clearly a real world problem and you could just imagine it to be the building in which your department is housed. And also there is a need to break the complex task into parts. So, they have to figure out on a floor wise basis what has to be done, on a per room basis how much coverage will be there for that room and they have to deal with the messiness of certain areas not getting coverage and so on and so forth. And finally of course they also learn the skills of project management they have to do the time management. There is also the notion of you know some leadership development that happens here where some of the students will take a leadership role and play the manager's role whereas others will play a detailed looking into the cost of various products such roles. So, all of these project management skills all of these skills get developed and also finally there is the benefit emerging from the collaborative nature of the problem. So what happens as a result of this is that students are not daunted to tackle a complex problem. So now if you were to give this problem to a single student they would be daunted to say that how do I go about designing this. The moment that there are more than two students involved in a project they are not daunted to tackle this problem and together they are able to learn new ways to approach the problem, learn different pros and cons of different ways. So those are some of the benefits of group projects. So one reason we structured the benefits in this manner is that when you design your own group projects try to ensure that some of these benefits are actually coming through in the task that you assign. For example on the first slide on benefits we were talking about students deepening subject understanding. So here it is actually the nature of the problem. You have to choose a problem, you have to formulate the problem such that all of this happens again based on the type of problem you choose students actually should be forced to break up the complex task into steps and so on. So the way you choose the content and you structure the wording you choose the format of the problem leads to some of these benefits. Some other benefits like the ones on the last page actually come from the fact that students are working with each other. So those aspects also have to be paid some attention. So what we will do when we get to the best practices part of this session is that we will look at different practices for enhancing some of these specific benefits. Having gone through so many slides on benefits and so many different benefits in the given example we of course have to see what are the concerns and challenges and so we will start with a caution that has been given just let me pose this for some let me leave the slide on you can read it and I am sure you all agree with what is said here. So the quote here says that simply assigning group work is no guarantee that the goals are achieved. So any task given for three students is not going to help you get all those benefits and not only that sometimes group projects backfire really badly. Students might get upset they might stop working so it is the situation might be worse than what it was before you assigned the group project. So in order to avoid all of these the projects have to be designed supervised and assessed in ways that promote both the teamwork, the collaboration and the complex task being addressed. So the specific challenges in fact some of you I am sure all of you have thought about it in your previous think-pass share activity some of the challenges that come up quite often in our classes are listed here that typically there is a student in some group who is called a sleeping partner or a freerider they do no work they know it is group project so they just go along for the ride and they get a lot of credit. The opposite problem might happen where one of the partners is very dominant and wants his or her decisions to prevail most of the time. This is often a case seen with the toppers in the class not all toppers are like that but sometimes you see them they want to maintain their grades so they know how to do it well and then they just want to push ahead. Sometimes what happens in a group project is that each member has a slightly different focus or agenda and they want to pursue that in great depth. So that becomes a problem for the team what do the others do when some one person is focusing on a particular item. And again related to groups and teams there may be conflicts the students may not be able to reach agreements and so on and these get in the way of actually solving the problem. And because of problems related to the group nature of the task the academic problem might be left unsolved. And of course as teachers how to assess is a big problem and this is something by problem we mean it is a challenge and this is something that many of you mentioned in the chat. So what we will do next is look at recommendations related to designing and assessing into separate parts of group projects so that the benefits are harnessed and the challenges are minimized as much as possible. So here are actually two recommendations this is the main thing that said we will elaborate on each of these and you will see that these two may sound a little contradictory. So it says that while designing group projects create interdependence between the team members to make sure that the work of one actually needs the work of the other the students have to talk to each other. So this is related to the team aspect and the other one is related to the individual aspect that somehow the teacher has to design the project so that individual accountability is ensured. And we will elaborate on each of these there is a third point which is actually related to the students understanding of what it means to work in teams. And we will talk about that one devoting time to discuss team work skills as one of the recommendations. So this is a one slide summary and now let us just go into each of them. So when we are talking of creating interdependence here are some ways to create this interdependence and what interdependence really means is that it should not be enough that each student does his or her own part and then they just simply put it all together. Each student's work should need something from the other student they should need to talk to each other they should have to discuss and reach agreements and negotiate and so on. So one recommendation is that ensure that the projects are sufficiently complex and not merely complicated. So what does this mean let us actually look at an example here. So here is another example from a computer networks course just take the moment read it if you are from the topic you will get the idea immediately and I will go back to the previous slide to explain what this is. So to solve a problem like this the students need to realize that well this problem is actually this problem can be solved only if some of the sub problems are solved. So they need to break down this problem identify the sub problems and solve each of the sub problems and then put it back together. So this task of breaking things together analysis and then synthesis is an important criterion when you are choosing the type of problem and when you are said when you are formulating the task. Instead if a problem simply has a series of steps they may be really difficult but if it is a series of steps in increasing difficulty which let us say one member can do it then there is not much motivation for students to work on it together. The person who can do the difficult steps will just go ahead and do it and everybody else might just go along. Another recommendation is that the goals of the problem should be such that collaboration is essential that the goals should be able to be met only through collaboration or mainly through collaboration and have at least a few goals of this nature in the project. So let us look at another example here. So here is a problem from an architecture course and read it again and then we will discuss. In this problem in this group project the instructor provides constraints or gives a problem but it is highly constrained. So the instructor provides students with materials such as tape or cardboard and students have to build a building according to specific design parameters but students cannot use any other materials than these. So they are constrained here. Because of these limited resources what they need to do is actually talk to each other and strategize as to how can only these resources be used to solve the problem. They have to they cannot divide the task and say okay the part is clear you do one part and I do another part right away. After they break it down it still is possible but that is okay. Another very typical constraint that is provided is budgetary or financial constraints that something needs to be built and here is a budget required for it. So again students need to strategize and optimize the cost of various components in order to solve that problem. Third recommendation this says encourage team identity because it is a group project what we are trying in all these recommendations is to try to make sure that each member of the team contributes and there is a need for each member in the project. So it is not 1 plus 1 plus 1 in the project it is actually three people working together. Competitions and games are in fact highly recommended for building a team identity. So here is again several examples. This is a set of examples from a mechanical engineering design course. You can find all these examples and the course materials in MIT's OCW the course is called design and manufacturing it is in mechanical engineering. What happens in this course is every year students have to design a robot that is the goal of the course year after year and the course has been running for about 15 years. But what the robot has to do is different each year but what is kept same year after year is that the class is split up into five or six teams and each team has to do the same task or each team's robot has to do the same task and there is a competition as to which robot does the best task. So in last year's course what is given here the robot had to do some environmental cleanup. So here are some buildings that were built and here is a lot of litter so the robot had to go through all these buildings pick up the crushed cans there is a can lying around here. Here are some cans that are not yet crushed so the robot had to decide what to do about it and the one the robot which did it fastest and cleanest their team won. Similarly here there is a ping-pong table which was built and this was also part of the design course and each team had to build a robot to win against the other teams robot. So what happens when there are competitions of games even though there is a strong basis of engineering design in all of these the teams feel more invested in their product. They are doing it not just for marks but because they want their team and their toy and their robot to win. So that is one recommendation for how you can get the teams to work together. When you have design courses and semester long courses these are some ideas you can implement. For shorter group projects also you can think of how to get the team identity via games and competitions. Finally one more recommendation given here is about assigning roles and rotating and you heard about this briefly in a few minutes ago. Assigning roles does not mean that one person goes and takes the readings, the other person or one person does part A, one person does part B and one does part C because you do not know what is part A, B and C. It means thinking about what are the teacher has to do this work a little bit beforehand. The teacher has to think what are the different possible roles, it is not about dividing the task but it is thinking about roles. So this is one example, this is a little abstract but you can think of something a little more concrete for your project that after doing let us say all three members of a team have a brainstorming session and then they have to decide which strategy to pick. One member becomes the facilitator actually tries to get the others to talk to each other and arrive at a consensus. One member is recording and the third member is the one who is going to report that to in the midterm report or so on. So again here skills which are leadership skills are being developed, communication skills are being developed and so on. One common role which people recommend that you include is that there should be one devil's advocate in the team. So one person who is constantly doubting and saying look that would not work because. So the role of that person is to come up with ways or come up with reasons why the solution would not work so that people can refine it and get to a better solution. And then after a few weeks you can rotate these roles so that everybody gets an experience. If you are teaching mechanical engineering or even other courses I encourage you to go and look at the site there are plenty of good ideas. And as we mentioned earlier we want to avoid all these undesirable parts. So the recommendation the broad recommendation which many of you in fact mentioned in the chat is to build in some component of individual assessment in addition to the group assessment. There will be a group project and a group presentation and maybe a group poster and so on maybe a group report but there has to be at least a little bit of individual component. So how to do that? And some methods that people have reported are having individual reports due mid term. So the mid term report each person has to hand in individually and the final report can be a group report or give a quiz based on the project and this is an individual quiz. This will work if you do not have 20 different projects in class let us say you have 5 different projects you can create simple quiz questions to ensure individual accountability so that everybody is working towards the basics. The other method that people report is in the VAEVA or in the oral exam that happens even if one person is doing the reporting the questions that the examiner ask can be to any of the other 3 students. So you may not one student may not have be actually reporting but he or she needs to be able to field all the questions. So again if you read what people have done about group projects you can get plenty of tips and perhaps one or two of these can work in your own context. Teamwork skills so this is something which is which we may not have thought of as teachers and that is because we are not really we do not know we do not always know what the students are thinking. It turns out that all workplaces of today function by efficient teamwork and you can go and look at group projects you can talk to people who are working and nobody will doubt this but it so happens that students especially undergraduate students are simply unaware of the extent to which this happens. In colleges we mostly focus on individual achievements we do not focus so much on teamwork and we do not know enough to help them realize that achievement actually happens when individual achievements are combined and the team does something which is better than what it was the team delivers. So one way that you can address this is to ask a recent graduate somebody who is almost a peer of the students to come and give a short guest talk on how actually projects happen in the workplace. And if students here their own peers talk about why teamwork is essential their motivation is set to improve for the group project. Some students may have had a prior negative experience in a group project in a previous course or somewhere. So it is up to the instructor really to ask this and address students preconceptions. So what I do when I assign group projects is sometime in the first week or so when they are assigned we have a short class discussion on what are your conceptions of group projects the students conceptions what are your concerns and come up with ways for our own class how to address those. It is a short discussion but students should know that it is good if students know that the teacher is aware of these. Students especially teenagers really do not know how to resolve conflicts they prefer to avoid it not all of them some of them still are able to do it but many of them want to avoid conflicts rather than try to resolve it. So it is up to us to try to figure out how to help them or to try to help them to figure out how to do it. And finally it is a matter of our expectations that if we want about what we want from the group projects do we want the final deliverable and that is it or do we actually want successful teamwork and collaboration. There is no right or wrong answer here it is our individual choices but if we give team projects and group projects then the collaborative nature it is a waste if we do not use it. And if we want collaboration to be a goal then we have to convey those expectations that even the process matters. This entire all these points actually can be discussed in one half hour meeting either in the beginning or if some individual teams are suffering if you feel that there is a conflict in a particular team you can actually go and discuss it there. Assessment because assessment turned out to be one of the major concerns when all of you listed your concerns and best practices. If we look a little more closely into why is it so hard to assess projects because we always give assessment in the form of exams to regular courses so why are projects so different. What we will see is that projects and presentations have some peculiar constraints and goals. We want to evaluate the process not just the product we just discussed that. Sometimes the products are not numerical answers there is a thing which is developed it may be a diagram it may be descriptive so what do we do with those. If you have design projects there is no single metric so how do we combine different metrics. So given all this traditional assessments like exams and quizzes are not useful so what do we do. And presentations are one form in which we do assess but again how do we assess the presentations needs us back to the same set of constraints. One solution so there are several possible solutions and today we will just look at one such solution and we will also implement them in the lab. This is a solution which actually you have seen in some of the homeworks and it is called a rubric. So what a rubric is really is a table of what are different levels of performance. So I am starting with the target performance going to lower levels of performance and here is going to be the criteria or the metric here is an example a rubric item from an electronics analog circuit course design course where students have to build an amplifier and build some circuits given the open problem. So this rubric actually assesses whether students are able to structure the problem using the given and the hidden specifications. So then what the instructor did is first say that first identify the criteria very very specifically that in order to build the amplifier one of the first steps is that students have to take the open problem and structure it using specifications. So the problem was design an amplifier for a particular use let us say for audio use or given an then the students have to realize well for audio I need the bandwidth has to be so much the gain has to be so much and let us assume it is high bandwidth and low gain. So from there they are starting to narrow down the problem from design an amplifier to something which has high bandwidth and low gain then they realize that the two are contradicting each other and they are not solving it they are merely refining the problem given the specifications. Then what the instructor did was to say that if somebody is able to structure it really well like an expert what would they do and then she wrote a description of the target level of performance. There are no marks here it is purely descriptive but there is a hierarchy. So if we look at a target level and let us look at something far away which is inadequate in the target level all specifications are used by the student decisions are made all interconnections are identified. This is what an expert would do and an inadequate score on this rubric would be some attempt is made to use specifications but they wrongly applied or they are missing and so on. The way rubric like this is used is that when students give a descriptive report you can see if they have used the specifications correctly or they have not. So it is like a checklist but it gives more detail than a checklist. So formally speaking it is a descriptive there is descriptions here rating scheme there I think this got reversed accidentally there is a hierarchy there is a rating and there are performance levels missing inadequate needs improvement and good. What is important when you design your own rubric is that you do not club everything together identify three or four important checklist criteria and write descriptions for each of them keep them independent because students might do well on some criteria may not do well on other criteria. How to use these rubrics definitely for assessment for by the instructor but it is highly recommended that students actually see these rubrics before they begin their projects. Because these are the metrics on which they are supposed to design that do their own projects and the metrics along which they are assessed. So it is very recommended that share them up front so that students use them during the process. It is not something it is not secret this is like the marking scheme but it is even more descriptive than that and as a teacher you can use it to measure students progress over the week. So let us say there is a project over six weeks you can use the same rubrics in the midterm report and the final report and see if they have improved and those students who have improved you can give them a higher grade. The metrics stay the same because it is the same set of rubrics. So finally, let us come to some technology tools that you can use for group projects. Because what you will do in the lab activity is in fact use some of these tools together with the projects. So before we I just have one example to show you one new example which are specific to projects but before that there is a quick activity for you and this is called a brainstorm race. What you will do here is you will have only one minute participants have to list as many possible technology tools for with group projects but along with their purpose. So you cannot simply say I will use a wiki you cannot simply say I will use wiki for collaboration that is still too broad you have to get specific to the level of wiki for students to write collaborative midterm reports. So participants can say it out in your class and the coordinators you can share it in the chat. So exactly one minute and your clock starts now ok. So it is good that you have some ideas because you will be using these in the lab and the answers we are getting some are for collaboration, some are for communication, some are for describing concepts and so on ok. So let us look at one more internet based resource really more than just the technology and this is something you can use for group projects at any level especially for getting students to think about questions which have open answers and it is called web quest. So what we will do here is I will actually walk you through some of the a couple of the website. So there is a set of resources called webquest.org and we are doing a screen share. So I hope you are able to see it on your screens. This has a list of existing projects as well as ways for you to create your own. So let us just do one example and then we will come to what is a web quest. So web quest is actually for students working on a project where they use internet resources to solve a problem and create a web page. Here the question was the problem they had to solve was what is a carbon footprint? What is your carbon footprint? So the first thing that the students had to do there, here are the different tasks that students had to calculate their own emissions, they had to explore ways to reduce their footprint and they had to actually go and find ways to reduce their own footprint. In order to solve these tasks students have to first go online, go to some web page, do some work here and come back. So this web page to which the web quest direct them is actually a survey where they take it and then they find out their score. Then they come back to the web quest and they can enter their answers and so on. So the web quest is really a tool to help the students and the teacher organize all of this together and finally a report of this sort is created, report or a portfolio is created where not just the final product because the product is here, the sub-area you can find it. But the entire process is documented what the students do, the students actually write this report and then somewhere else they calculate their answer and their report back and so on. A web quest like this also helps the instructor create rubrics, so the instructor creates these rubrics and gives a score after the students submit the web page. It is the same set of tasks that we had described earlier, so in terms of specific tasks you may see that it is similar. But this what the web, what this tool does is help you keep all these pieces together and students can also monitor their progress at different times, activity. So what we will do now is I will just walk you through this activity, it is uploaded here on Moodle. You can if you want to work individually on this activity that is fine, otherwise choose a partner from your own domain and start by writing the learning objectives for the group project. Include objectives for the group as well as for individuals, include objectives related to the product as well as the process. Product is the final deliverable of your group project. Ask the actual question and make sure that the best practices are followed. In the activity that is uploaded, the worksheet has a series of small set of self-assessment questions to make sure that these practices are followed. Include the use of some technology tool and go beyond PowerPoint again as just as morning. Try to include, try to get the students to use the technology. So of course you can use Moodle to put everything together, but try to get the students like you saw in yesterday morning session to use technology in their projects. Not just the building of it, but maybe the collaboration aspect and so on. And then devise two or three assessment rubric items. So the same guidelines as usual if you have questions, write it to us over Moodle. Tomorrow's sessions we will do some live interaction and we will also look into how you can use these strategies in class and determine, assess whether what you did was effective or not. So have to go to the lab, finish this activity and then we meet tomorrow.