This is the beginning of a multi-part series on ideas to design for community and collaboration in your course, including Part II, Connecting Asynchronously - in any modality!, and Part III, Communicate and Collaborate. This series was first developed as a list of resources for asynchronous online courses, but most activities will work equally well in multiple modalities. For example, this collaboration framework was developed for online learning, but could easily be used in face to face, synchronous or blended courses.

We'll start out today introducing a framework for supporting student collaboration; follow-up posts will share ideas that roughly match with the phases of the framework.

Graphic description of Conrad and Donaldson's Phases of Engagement in an online classroom Image source: Conrad and Donaldson's framework on Phases of Engagement in an online classroom

Jessica Cannon provides a great summary of this framework in a blog post; we'll try to briefly paraphrase it here:

Phase One: during the first and second week of the course, instructors help students get connected with the course, the instructor, and each other. This could look like a warm, welcome video from the instructor, ice breakers and introductions among students, or lessons on "Netiquette," student success, time management, etc.
Phase Two: in weeks three and four, students practice communicating together around academic content.
Phase Three: by weeks five and six of the semester, students start learning to collaborate together - perhaps by combining the groups of 2-3 into groups of 4-6. Again, starting off with lower-stakes projects, students work together on a debate, project, solving a problem, or a content discussion. Instructors support the interaction by assigning group roles, helping students create a group agreement, etc. Lower-level courses may continue this phase for the rest of the semester.
Phase Four: In upper-level or graduate classes, students take the lead in the second half of the course, with groups choosing areas of work, leading discussions, or creating presentations for the rest of the class.
Finally, at the end of the class, metacognitive reflection helps students think about the skills they've learned that they can carry forward into future classes.

Why use this framework? We think it provides a way to build a culture of collaboration across a semester, builds on itself and slowly helping students gain the skills they need to be successful academic collaborators - a skill they might never have learned or practiced! Particularly in online environments, learning how to collaborate without physical proximity is a learned skill.

Check out the rest of the series, including Part II, Connecting Asynchronously - in any modality!, on the connecting phase, and Part III, Communicate and Collaborate, on ideas for academic collaboration in the rest of the semester.

Hat tip to Dr. Jessica Cannon for sharing this framework online!