Online group-work (#2)

Reaching my goal: the final product or the path

Nothing wrong with being a group-leader and trying to get things done, right?

That is what I thought at first, and, although I still think I will keep the leader attitude in future similar group-work situations, our group discussions on the ONL group-work topic made me seriously reflect on my attitude towards completing tasks.

Three topics have been discussed in the last six weeks. Our ONL group has successfully completed each of the three tasks given, and produced interesting digital documents for the whole ONL community to further reflect on. But during the first four weeks I honestly went through some frustrations with our group dynamics.Furthermore, I had the feeling that I was not the only one… So when the learning in communities topic came out, it was time to actually ask everyone how was our own ONL group experience.

The group agreed on building a mentimeter questionaire with 5 statements that we could each grade from strongly disagree to strongly agree (Figure 1). It took less than 2 minutes for each of us to fill it in and the results were ready to be discussed in the next session. As I usually do, I volunteered to build up the mentimeter. I came up with teh different statements and opened up the mentimeter for each of us to vote. Rookie mistake! As I was writing down the five statements, it stroked me that even though I was using my noted from the meeting, I was alone to decide on those five points… Nobody complained about what I had built, but this should have been built as a group.

Figure 1: Final results of the group experience

Results turned out to be interesting, and even more was the following discussion. In general, we were all happy with the group-work, we all agreed that this is a great learning experience, and we all have room to discuss, offer input and contribute. However, many of us would like to suggest changes, and this probably to try and improve the dynamic of the group. I say ‘probably’ because there was no way with the mentimeter used to collect qualitative data from each of us. Rookie mistake #2: our ‘survey’ on the group experience remains incomplete, and there is no clear suggestion provided to improve our group-work experience. I think I would have suggested a more structured use of the online meetings. Maybe designing a clear plan, would help each of us know what has to be done before the following meeting and thus we would be more productive in between the meetings. For example: by meeting #2 we should know for sure what everyone think of the given topic, and everyone should have provided their personal experience related to it. My meeting #3 we should have gathered most of the information on the topic, and by meeting #4 we should be able to produce the final output to complete the task. I think for the first four weeks of the course we were spending too much time on reaching step2, and then we were running through step3 and 4. But this was my own suggestion, what would the other members have to offer?

As we were discussing those results, one of us mentioned that the experience was truly only positive to her. She had learned so much so far, from the group members, from the tools used, from the course coordinators, that she could not see one single thing she would like to change. Her experience was complete and above her original expectation. While she was talking, I realized that I, in contrast, had been very focused on completing the tasks, and although I knew I was learning a lot during the process, this process was not my main goal anymore. Could the leader role I was taking on during some of the discussions be affecting what I was getting out from the course? Was it affecting my expectations from the course?