How important is effective communication in online learning teams?

Topic: How important is effective communication in online learning teams? Why are learning teams important in the online learning environment and how can they enhance the overall learning opportunities? What ethical considerations and boundaries should students follow in order to ensure an effective peer learning environment?

      Effective communication is the most crucial part of the online learning teams just like it is in any teams. The importance of the effective communication between team members cannot be more emphasized because team members must collaborate to gather information, make suggestions, give feedback and solve problems. Maintaining learning efficiency and understanding each other can be challenge to online teams because it is difficult to interact simultaneously and therefore cannot interrupt or direct meetings successfully. This can lead to the poor time efficiency because when a collision of ideas occurs, it takes longer to reach a conclusion (Anderson & Shane, 2002). Therefore the frequent interaction between team members is important to the online learners to improve their performance. In addition to that, Moore (1989) identified three kinds of interaction for online learning: learner-content, learner-instructor, and learner-learner. Among them, interaction of learners seems to be one of the most influential factors of online learning. (Swan, 2001)

      Students must be considerate to the others when communicating online. Due to the nature of the online environment, it is very easy to upset each other’s feelings by miscommunication and therefore when giving critical feedback it is important to first imagine being the person who is receiving that feedback. The person receiving the feedback on the other hand needs to accept the critical feedback as the constructive ways to improve their weaknesses.

References:
Ying Chieh, L., & Burn, J. M. (2007). Improving the Performance of
Online Learning Teams, 18(3), 369-379.
Anderson, F. F., and Shane, H. M. (2002), “The impact of
netcentricity on virtual teams: The new performance
challenge,” Team Performance Management, Vol. 8, No.
1/2, pp. 5-12.

Moore, M. G. (1989), “Three types of interaction,” American
Journal of Distance Education, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 1-6.

Swan, K. (2001), “Virtual interaction: Design factors
affecting student satisfaction and perceived learning in
asynchronous online courses,” Distance Education, Vol.22, No. 2, pp. 306-331.

The article “Improving the performance of Online Learning Teams – A discourse analysis” by Liu and Burn conducted interesting research. It is a basically a comparison between Face to Face teams and Online Learning teams, of the different factors that influence the performance of each teams. They conducted an experiment using Face to face teams and Online Learning teams where the only difference is the lack of face-to-face meetings. The factors that influence the performance on each teams are quite contrary to each other:

For FTF teams, the performance is at their best when there are more “process gain” activities. The analysis showed that a better performance was resulted when team members were willing to help each other and gave time towards the development of ideas. These behaviors kept the team more bondable and motivated. On the opposite side, among the factors that decrease the performance was a “free-rider” member. Free-rider refers to the member who allows other members to do all the works and keeps silent. The free-rider members provoked a chain reaction of de-motivation and discouragement among other members.

On the other hand, frequent conversations and more discussions was the key factor of improving performance for Online Learning Teams. This basically proves the effective communication in online learning teams is the most important aspect of Online Learning Teams. There is also a difference in communication patterns. In OLT groups the best performance was achieved when they applied “process→content→process→content” communication pattern. To explain this in detail, firstly members discuss the processes needed to proceed to the study. This includes the distribution of the task, the means of communication and the frequency needed to check the discussion board. This is followed by a discussion of content. Next some process issues might arise, such as members missing some interactions because of travel or sickness. in this case members have to re-discuss the allocation of the task. This regular pattern was found in groups with better performance in OLT.

References:

Ying Chieh, L., & Burn, J. M. (2007). Improving the Performance of

Online Learning Teams, 18(3), 369-379.