Group work in college. Are multiple perspectives represented when students are from one course?

Collaborative learning and higher education. Many universities require students to work on projects in teams. This was true in my doctoral program at Northwestern University, and I think it was very successful in that environment because the people who worked together came from different disciplines and brought different skills to each project. For example, a typical project would include one person with a background in computer science, a 2nd with a background in education, a 3rd with a background in communication, and a 4th with a background in social sciences. We divided up the tasks according to our skills but the project ultimately had to come together as one coherent package.

Many universities require students to work in learning teams to write papers or put projects together. One well-known difficulty is that one person on the team may not pull her or his weight so the others have to pick up the slack. I think that there is another problem which is that the collaboration, the learning team creating an object, involves a relatively homogeneous group: everyone is taking the same course at the same time and demonstrating the same skills. True they bring slightly different backgrounds and knowledge to the project but they all have the same identical learning objectives and course outcomes to demonstrate.

I would like to see more heterogeneous groups working together on projects in classes. So imagine combining, for example, nurses, urban planners, teachers, and computer scientists, to create some to work together on some joint project. The difficulties are obvious which is that nurses have to learn different things than do urban planners are teachers or computer scientists and so figuring out the project and how an individual’s participation demonstrates the desired learning not outcomes, that is difficult. Nevertheless, it’s something that I would like to think about exploring.