Collaborative Learning: Class Environments that Value Cooperation over Competition

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. -- Pericles

UGA undergraduate culture is based on individual performance and competition, but much of life beyond the classroom requires an ability to collaborate. Although Teams are used in many courses, many students get “teamed” out and fail to appreciate the value of working in teams. Constructive or simulated learning environments attempt to create “Real Life” situations that motivate students to go beyond memorization and recitation to application, but assessment of learning is problematical. To this end Mark Huber (Management Information Systems) and Rob Shewfelt (Food Science) have teamed up to organize an interdisciplinary Faculty Learning Community to

• develop techniques that more effectively use collaborative exercises in courses,
• apply these techniques in classroom settings of the members of the Learning Community, and
• assess the effectiveness of these applications in improving student learning.

Faculty Learning Communities are like living organisms as they are outcome driven but remain flexible to adapt to needs of community. Based on the consensus of community members we will seek outcomes such as

• a module that can be used by any instructor who uses teams or collaborative class projects.
• a collaborative learning exercise applied to a class of each member in the community.
• a book of edited chapters on collaborative learning and teams in the classroom that will be created to support the Global Text Project, a project designed to develop free open-content electronic texts for university students in the developing world (http://www.uga.edu/news/artman/publish/060901_GlobalTextProject.shtml and http://www.scidev.net).

Join us as we discover how to weave collaborative and cooperative learning into our teaching, our classrooms, and into the learning of our students.

Norris Armstrong, Genetics
Marsha Black, Environmental health Science
Sherry Clouser, Center for Teaching & Learning
Shelby Funk, Computer Science
Robert Hill, Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy
Amelia Hutchinson, Romance Languages
Corey Johnson, counseling and Human Development Services
Evan Powell, Educational Psychology & Instructional Technology
Margaret Robinson, Social Work
Karen Russell, Advertising/Public Relations
Patricia Sullivan, International Affairs
CHi Thai, Biological and Agricultural Engineering
Ian Thomas, UGA Libraries/Science Reference
Beth Tolley, Elementary and Social Studies
Bill Tollner, Biological and Agricultural Engineering
Kari Turner, Animal and Dairy Science

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This page last updated on January 7, 2008.