Many of the students at World Campus choose the online education options for different reasons; one, is the opportunity to get an Education from Penn State, working on the assignments from the comfort of one’s home at the student’s convenience. This independent working is a challenge when team assignments are present. These particular teams’ assignments, need the interaction of every member, that interaction is a challenge by the geographic location of every member of the team. Often students in a team are in locations far as Japan or Thailand, sometimes they are different times zones within the United States. Because in order for the team to accomplish a goal, team interaction is need while they are, working on a task (Utley ET all, 2009) this is particularly challenging given the lack of direct contact with other team members (Pennsylvania State University, 2013).
The team size and members and in general are assign by the professor, in general this stage will be the forming of the team. Once the team is form the team members proceed with the storming stage characterize by interchange of e-mails, electronic ways of communication and students individuals’ schedules to determine the best times to meet. Sometimes the geographic distance, times’ zones differences, and team members’ schedules conflicts. There are often disagreements, but, if manage in a proper way it can be a positive, because, it will introduce new ideas to the team in how to proceed to accomplish the team’s mission, the team assignment. (Pennsylvania State University, 2013).
Sometimes couple of students take leadership and cooperate with each other in the accomplishment of setting goals, create norms, schedules, and share electronic documents in Google to facilitate the team’s interaction. The team has reached a performing stage by depending on each other and they focus on the development of the assignment. Tuckman and Jensen (1977), added and adjourning portion to the team model. The Adjourning stage of the team is reach when the assignment is turn in. The team will reform again to work on additional assignments through the semester (Pennsylvania State University, 2013).
World Campus students’ leaders face challenging tasks to maintain team cohesion such as, keeping clear and engaging direction, enabling performance, where the team organization promotes team work, provide coaching and assistance, and providing adequate resources to the level of the project (Pennsylvania State University, 2013).
For the past three years, I have been fortunate to experience distance learning team leadership at is best. Most of the time my teams were disperse around the globe. I have work late into the night in a discussion boards with students in the military station in Iraq or Germany, while other students are located in the west coast, or Hawaii. That is perhaps the most challenging portion of teamwork at World Campus, but for these three years, I have been able to interact with exceptional people all over the globe. I am going to miss my World Campus friends and professors. This has been a truly enriching journey!
References
Pennsylvania State University. (2013). Psychology 485 Leadership. Retrieved from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp13/psych485/001/common/homepage.html
STACEY JEAN BURNS says
Claudia,
As someone who works a full time job outside of the home and with two young children, I agree with you that the team assignments do cause odd hours. A course that I took last spring had a team assignment that was unusual for me. Out of the four of us, one was a professional skier who had a major competition in the middle of the semester, one was getting married and would be honeymooning for two weeks on a cruise, and the other member was in the military. There was no procrastination for the team assignments. The ones that were going to be due during these times had to be done in advance.
It does take special people to take the World Campus courses. It’s easy to become “off the radar” and get behind on readings, etc. It’s not like a physical class where someone can see that there has been an issue going on or sicknesses.
The team assignments have actually helped me in my professional job as well. The company is moving to allow more telecommuting and this has helped me to still be able to work with my team away from the office locations. I am actually part of a team with other people from other states. We are, in my opinion, in the “norming” stage now.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
KARIN L HOUSELL says
Thanks Claudia for sharing this. I think when you write about this you are definitely voicing many other World Campus students’ sentiments.
I too have also been part of many group assignments where the professor assigns randoms classmates to work on a specific project or tasks. Just as described in your blog and our lesson, we went through the four stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing. Working online in a group definitely had it challenges but in the end it was a good learning experience. Especially in this technical age that we live in more and more work meetings and environments are virtual and only available online.