Online Communication & Teamwork

Staying in Contact with your instructor

Instructors are available by email and by phone and their contact information is provided in the course materials. Contact your instructor immediately if you have trouble understanding course content.

Participating in Online Discussion

In your online distance courses, online discussion using WebBoard or WebCT takes the place of your “classroom” interaction. Here are some suggestions for communicating effectively online with your classmates and your instructors:

• Use phrases in your conference postings and email that include everyone in the course. Use simple language.
• Be specific about why you found ideas useful or interesting. If you disagree with some aspect of someone’s comment, do so in a respectful and considerate way.
• If you don’t understand some aspect of someone’s submission or comment, ask for clarification.
• If comments from your classmates bring out strong reactions from you, give yourself some time to consider their points of view before responding.
• Try to respond to conference postings and email within 24 hours (48 hours maximum). But pay attention to the expectations of the instructor for that course. Be guided by the time frames included in the directions for learning activities and assignments.
• Communicate concerns honestly.

Participating In Virtual Teams

In some of your courses, you’ll participate in virtual teams to complete some assignments.

When you are working in a team assignment, either your instructor will assign the members of the team or you will choose teams. Each team will be set up with their own private team workspace online.

Either the team or the instructor will name someone as the team’s coordinator. Generally, the coordinator keeps the team on schedule, mediates any disputes, and is the link between the team and the instructor. Typically, the coordinator will also submit the assigned work on behalf of the team.

In some cases, you will also be partnered with a member of your team to work on a particular problem or to draft or edit content. In these cases, you can use email to work with your partner. On completion, you will likely post your partnered work to team’s private conference for further discussion or work.

Here are some suggestions for communicating effectively online with your teammates and your instructors:

• Begin communicating with teammates as soon as your team is established and keep communicating.
• Be specific about why you found a teammate’s ideas useful or interesting. If you disagree with some aspect of a comment, do so in a respectful and considerate way.
• If you don’t understand some aspect of a teammate’s submission or comment, ask for clarification.
• If comments from your online teammates bring out strong reactions from you, give yourself some time to consider their points of view before responding.
• Team bonds are strengthened when the team leader arranges to get team members together periodically in person. If this is not possible, try to incorporate more casual meetings/topics unrelated to work periodically.
• Express appreciation for ideas and finished tasks.
• Try to respond to conference postings and email within 24 hours (48 hours maximum). Set up policies or specific times to check conference postings as a group. This will avoid someone missing out on an important meeting or topic.
• When you cannot send a complete reply in a timely manner, at minimum let teammates know that you received their message, and that more will follow to your reply.
• Communicate concerns honestly.
• Avoid references to private discussions you may have off-line with team members.

Here are some suggestions for organizing as a team:

• Ask questions to help get the team thinking about its goals.
• Develop as few or as many process rules as the team needs, archive them, and commit to using them.
• Aim for a fair division of labour.
• Agree on activities, assign and schedule them, and monitor the status of activities.
• Brainstorm without evaluating ideas.
• Decide how to decide; discuss why consensus is different from compromise.
• Determine how the team will handle conflict — a little conflict will help the group re-examine opinions, share diverse ideas and discuss creative solutions; some virtual teams enforce a rule that if one team member has a conflict with another, it can’t be dealt with electronically — one person phones the other or they meet in person.
• Review and approve all final documents as a team.

Web-based Resources for Teamwork

Tips for Teamwork and Team Writing
http://www.urban.uiuc.edu:8080/tutorials/teamwork/Default.html
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Useful suggestions for working in teams and collaborating to prepare a document.