There are a number of ways you can design group interactions in Canvas, each with their own pros and cons. A faculty member I collaborate with, Karen Jensen, recently implemented Penn State’s custom functionality known as Teams as part of her EGEE 120 course. After a successful offering using Teams, we spoke in detail about the experience.
One of the main reasons Karen chose to implement Teams had to do with academic integrity violations. In previous offerings Karen began to notice a few things occurring:
- Students were submitting assignments from previous semesters.
- Students kept using the same assignment each week of the course and simply updating the work to reflect the requirements of the new assignment.
By implementing Teams, she was able to address both of these concerns easily. She used the same assignments, but broke students up into groups, and required the submissions to include concepts specifically from the readings assigned that week. Each group was given a different type of assignment to complete for each week. Some were creative representations, some were information-based, and others were discussion-based. This increased the longevity of the assignments, reducing the need to revise every assignment for a new semester while increasing the level of difficulty. By limiting the number of submissions for each weekly assignment, it made it much harder for students to share work across semesters.
Additional benefits of this model include the ability to make grading more manageable and fun. It provided her with clear breaking points in her grading and allowed her to have a greater focus on the submissions. She knew she only had to grade 5 submissions per assignment type each week. This allowed her to have a nice mix of assignments that she loves and assignments that are necessary and more challenging to focus on. By knowing she only had to review 5 submissions of the more challenging assignments, she could reward herself by following that grading ‘sprint’ with a more enjoyable assignment.
Overall, this experiment with Teams was a successful one and she continues to implement this strategy in her online course.