Challenge in Collaboration

Our students taking fully online courses spoke consistently about wanting to take online courses for the flexibility it would provide. Students want to go at their pace, set their own goals, and learn on their time in their way.

The problem with this desire for the teacher is how to build in collaborative activities, something that many students also enjoyed in their online classes. If my students are all over the place in a particular module or even in different modules, for example, how can I offer a collaborative experience that will reach all students where they are and not waste their time?

One way is to disrupt the normal pacing of a module with a challenge. Challenges can be for a small group you see are in a similar place in a module, but challenges can also be large-scale for the whole class to engage with.

Looking at the steps of Challenge-Based Learning from this article helps plan the kind of challenge that could help with designers. The key steps involved in designing a challenge for your course are these:

1. Coming up with the big idea - I would encourage this to be student led and teacher facilitated
2. Building the essential question
3. Issuing the Challenge
4. Facilitating and supporting learners as they break down the essential question into smaller questions and deciding on the research needed to address the complexities of the challenge (understanding what they need to know). 
5. Coaching learners as they generate a solution. The big idea and essential question should be complex enough to allow for many solutions. The solutions produced by the learners should be concrete enough to implement. The goals for the solution should be broken down into stages that are clearly attainable. 
6. Implement the solutions in the most authentic way possible. Let students decide the best way to showcase their work and solutions to others. 
7. Provide opportunities for students to evaluate the work of others and reflect on their own work and process. 

 Teachers can download a classroom guide here and look in the toolkit section of the main site for more resources. Here is an interesting example for a writing-based challenge. The students created a video and book about body image. There is a more step-by-step template here. Because Challenge Based Learning started with Apple, there are more resources on iTunes U as well, including a student guide and a movie.

 In the curriculum writing sessions we have held over the past two weeks, we have been talking about students being problem finders after watching Ewan McIntosh's TED talk.

Turning the problem into a challenge that encourages students to apply their learning, reach an authentic audience, and make a difference would be an empowering and engaging experience for students.

The challenge can be as long and wide-reaching (content-wise) as you want to make it. To me, this is the beauty of a threaded course that is not chronologically linked but instead linked around an idea. This way, the thread becomes the heart of the challenge, and the students can connect to that thread from wherever they are in the course. It links them together, even if they are individually working through different content.

So, for example, the blended English IV AP course currently has the thread of the outcast. With this thread, the teacher can issue a challenge to groups or to the course as a whole dealing with some of the many problems surrounding the outcast in society, something all students in all places of the course are thinking about and exploring. This could tie in to greater campus discussions, such as with cyber bullying, but it would not have to. Other courses with threads that embody the notion of change or the impact a person can make in the world could really capitalize on current events to make the challenge, and the course, more meaningful and relevant.