Online Collaboration-My story

I am currently a graduate student at NJIT where my program is delivered in a distance-learning format. I have 3 courses offered on the course management platform WebCt and 1 on Moodle. I was attracted to the program because it was online, but at the time I did not fully understand the extent of collaboration efforts that would be expected to complete course assignments.

For my Cultural and Technological Change course, I was required to work with three other students to complete weekly assignments that consisted of reading specific chapters and collaborating with group members to produce one summary and one question to pose to the other groups in the course. We also had to produce a combined answer to each question posed by the other groups and this endured for an entire semester. We each produced our own work and then came together to bring out main ideas to be included in the final summary. We setup weekly chats and deadlines to submit individual work, but the entire process was very frustrating because of Webct constraints. WebCt does not support any audiovisual components and the design of the chat was very outdated which made it hard to keep track of information that we discussed. The majority of the entire course was collaboration and it was a lot to deal with as a first time graduate student. It was discouraging to later find that other groups were appointing one person to do the weekly assignment and then the others would read it and give feedback.
For my Elements of Visual Design course, we were responsible for collaborating and creating two wikis, which were fun. There was not the same amount of pressure in this type of collaboration and it was interesting to see the various edits that students were making as the project progressed. I could see myself working professionally with others in a similar format.

An online course is advantageous because it is convenient, accessible, and will strengthen communication skills and help to improve time-management as well. As an undergrad, I was not a fan of lectures that I could easily fall asleep in and I thought that it would be interesting to try online courses for graduate school. Having a face-to-face course fosters collaboration because you can be assured that people are "there" and it is easier to talk to someone rather than type a message and hope that they respond.

I think that having audio and video capabilities available for students to communicate with other students will improve the discussions in online courses, although people are in different time zones and will not be able to all be online at the same time. This option will particularly be beneficial for teamwork within courses that require extensive collaborative efforts.
Having this option available will also strengthen communication between students and their professors. There are often times when professors will not join in on discussions and this proves to be discouraging when students are struggling to find answers and could benefit from their teacher's insights.

This first semester was a big challenge, but I can see a difference between my learning experience in Webct compared to those in Moodle. The design and usability of the platform that an online course is delivered through are very important and professors should try out different options and choose the best one for the success of their students.