Editor's note: This is a series of articles profiling the research of our department's faculty and graduate students

By Laura Hoffman
Junior, Mass Communication

A department professor and his graduate students are using Web-based technology to measure students' collaborative work efforts.

Associate Professor Sorin Adam Matei and his graduate assistants are conducting the "Visible Effort" pilot experiment, which consists of using a wiki as a tool to determine how undergraduate students balance their workload in a group setting.

A wiki is a Web-based space where anyone can input information or modify existing information with minimal computer skills, similar to the Wikipedia Web site. The researchers are having groups from 15 COM 114 classes post their projects, outlines of speeches, on the wiki.

Robert Bruno, Ph.D. student and one of the lead researchers, said that usually students are assigned to groups to work on projects without being monitored by their professors. By having students post their individual work on the wiki, professors will be able to assess how much effort each student contributes and if the group work is divided up equally.

Matei said that both the students and the professors will know if the work is divided up evenly by the background color of the wiki. If the group workload is not balanced, the background will be red, but as the workload becomes more balanced, the background will turn green. Each student can view how much their contribution constitutes as a proportion of the total group effort. If this is under the average level of contribution, they will need to increase their effort. If it is over the average, they could slow down to allow the rest of the team to catch up.

Matei said that as a professor, he has often seen the effects of inequality regarding students' work. He has had students in the past who have been unhappy about having to do a majority of the work, so he wants to find the best possible balance of effort for a group. 

 "It goes further than just creating teaching tools about the evenness of collaboration," Matei said. "The idea that the best groups are where the workload is even is a naïve proposition, so I want to find the best mix."

If the experiment has a positive outcome, Bruno said that professors may use the wiki tool in their curriculum to make their classes better.

Matei thinks that teachers are often reluctant to use collaboration as a tool for teaching, and he hopes after conducting this experiment people will embrace it more.

"We don't really know how much students communicate, and peer learning should be core," Matei said. "Group learning should be as open as possible, and by using this tool, we can find the natural equilibrium."

The second phase of the experiment will occur next fall.