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Using Groupware to EnhanceTeaching and Learning inUndergraduate EconomicsSteven A. GreenlawPublished online: 25 Mar 2010.

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Using Groupware to Enhance Teaching and Learning in Undergraduate Economics

Steven A. Greenlaw

Computer-assisted instruction has been around for some time, but only in the last few years have economists begun using the tools of local area networks and the Internet for teaching purposes. Instructors have used Gopher, electronic mail, and list-servs or newsgroups for disseminating information about their courses and have even held rudimentary electronic discussions outside of the classroom.’ But more recent technologies such as groupware hold greater promise.

Groupware is a generic term for network-based software designed to facilitate group activities such as discussions, debates, joint papers, or team projects. Groupware combines elements of Web pages, electronic bulletin boards, and dis- cussion lists to create a shared hypermedia environment in which multiple users can read and edit each other’s files synchronously or asynchronously. The mar- ket leader is Lotus NOTES, although a variety of other products are available.2

Originally intended to enhance business decisionmaking processes, this class of software has potential for classroom use as well.’ Imagine a discussion of a topic that takes place, not in a classroom on a given day but rather electronically over days or even weeks, where participants have the time and opportunity to reflect and explore the various issues. Use of software does not preclude face-to- face classroom meetings, but it certainly goes beyond them. In addition to tradi- tional text materials, participants may draw on electronic documents supplied by the instructor or available from the Internet. Over the course of the discussion, participants literally construct a reusable base of knowledge.

The theoretical justification for using groupware comes from the active learning paradigm known as constructivism. Using traditional pedagogy, an instructor might present a lecture, that is, the refined product of his own research, whereas a constructivist would provide an environment in which students construct their own understanding of the source materials (e.g., a class discussion). A constructivist might ask students to read from a bibliography of sources instead of a textbook. Although a lecturer is likely to deliver a better product, in the sense of a more knowledgeable interpretation of the literature, proponents of constructivism argue that students are likely to learn more from the process of digging through the mate- rials. Jonassen et al. (1995, 16) explain, “knowledge construction occurs when stu-

Steven A. Greenlaw is an associate professor of economics at Mary Washington College (e-mail: sgreenla@mwc.edu). The author thunks David Aversman. Daphne Burt, Robert Rvcroji, Patrick Sars- field. and two anonymous refereesfor their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

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dents explore issues, take positions, discuss those positions in an argumentative format, and reflect on and re-evaluate their positions.”

A variety of instructional media embody constructivism; groupware provides a particularly striking example. Klemm (1996, 4) observes:

hypertext is [an] intrinsically constructivist environment in that information is actively engaged, and there are many paths for interconnecting ideas. This is espe- cially evident. . . because students not only follow hypertext links created by others but they make their own decisions about where to create hypertext links to informa- tion that they wish to integrate into the dynamically evolving information base.

A number of articles have been published in the educational technology and management literatures describing groupware applications, including Ackermann (1995), Everett and Ahern (1994), Klemm and Snell (1994 and 1996), and Rifkin (1995). Little has been done to date in economic^.^ In this article, I discuss my expe- rience using a groupware application called Forum to teach seminars in undergrad- uate economics. From this experience, I draw conclusions about the potential for using groupware more generally for teaching and learning in economics. I find that groupware can create a venue for electronic discussion that captures the best fea- tures of both in-class discussion (that is, the dynamic interaction and cooperative learning) and writing assignments (thoughtful insights backed by careful research).

FORUM SOFTWARE

Forum creates a common, hypertext workspace, similar to a World Wide Web page, but accessible only to authorized participants. All papers, questions, and other comments by the participants become part of the workspace, which can include both text and graphical information. Forum is inexpensive, easy to learn, and easy to use. Running under Microsoft Windows, it requires no special equip- ment other than access to the campus network, either through a hard-wired con- nection or by dialing in via modem. The software is flexible and allows the instructor to tailor the Forum environment to fit the needs of the class. In addi- tion, the software creates a tangible product of the course, namely the hypertext record of the discussion, which students can use as the course progresses and take with them when the course is completed.

Groupware such as Forum lends itself to designing a series of assignments requiring successively higher cognitive skills.5 Klemm ( 1996, 7) notes, “Because the electronic environment makes it easy for everyone to see what everyone else is doing, students have more opportunity to learn to read and write critically.” Simi- larly, a recent study by the Lotus Institute (1996, 6) observed, “Students actively learning in cooperative groups have demonstrated an ability to generate higher- level reasoning strategies, greater diversity of ideas, more critical thinking, and increased creative responses compared to learning individually or competitively.”

Use of Forum in Class

In 1995, I taught two seminars using Forum; the first course had 14 students and the second, 18. In previous years, my seminar students were asked to read a

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collection of research monographs and journal articles. They then wrote a series of papers summarizing, comparing, and contrasting their findings. They further refined their thinking individually and collectively through in-class discussions. This past year, I taught the courses with the same readings, the same formal papers, and to approximately the same number of students as in previous years. The difference was that I added an electronic discussion component outside of class using the Forum software.

The Forum homepage for one seminar, based on the course syllabus, is shown in part in Figure I . Under each topic, I created a series of links to other “pages” listing suggested readings and the class assignments. These links were either in the form of

FIGURE 1 Sample Forum Homepage

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highlighted text (boxed in the figure) or in the form of icons (question marks in the figure). Both types of links are accessible by clicking the mouse cursor.

For the first assignment, I asked students to write a brief essay exploring some aspect of the course content. I asked them to attach their papers to the bottom of the assignment sheet by the day before a subsequent class meeting. This is illus- trated in Figure 2, where the notebook icons represent the student papers. Then I asked them to read another student’s paper (assigned at random) before class.

The morning of that class meeting, I quickly read all the papers in roughly one hour and wrote brief notes to myself. By class time, students had read on the topic, written an essay to further clarify their thinking, and read the views of at least one

FIGURE 2 Sample Forum Assignment Sheet

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other student. In addition, I knew each student’s views, which allowed me to struc- ture the discussion and to call on individuals who either knew the answer to a ques- tion someone had raised or had an interesting question of their own.

By the second assignment, once students had become sufficiently familiar with Forum and the course procedure, I added another dimension to the process. In addition to writing the paper and reading the paper of someone else in the class, I asked students to write a brief response to the author of the paper they read. It could be a question, a comment, or a statement of agreement or disagreement. The true electronic discussion began here.

Students frequently read and wrote comments on their peers’ papers. Whereas some of the comments were required, over time students contributed many more on their own. The course took on a life of its own through this electronic discus- sion parallel to what was going on in the classroom.

Many variations of this basic assignment can be used. In lieu of requiring stu- dents to read and comment on another’s paper, they can be asked to identify the “best” paper from a group and to explain their reasoning. In addition to com- pelling students to read more than one paper, this assignment requires them to compare and contrast, which are higher-order cognitive skills. When I assigned this exercise, the first few respondents followed my explicit directions and select- ed a single paper. Then a curious thing happened. One student selected parts of several different students’ papers, explaining “I liked individual A’s introduction, B’s explanation of this, C’s explanation of that, etc.” Other students continued this approach, and a discussion sprang up justifying the choices taken. This type of synthesis was clearly more than I expected from the assignment.

Use as an Archive

An important feature of groupware is the ability to use it as an archive of the learning that occurs in the course. For example, the class can be divided into small groups6 and each group can be asked to read and summarize a selection of readings or other media. The resulting document can then be posted. Because every paper and comment posted becomes part of the archive, they can be used as resources for subsequent papers and comments. They can even be used in sub- sequent courses. Participants can also create links from new documents to docu- ments posted earlier in the term, literally building on their own and others’ pre- vious work. Finally, students find the archive useful for studying for exam- inations, perhaps more so than the underlying texts.

From a teacher’s perspective, the archive also has advantages. Because it pro- vides a better record of discussion than is typical, it makes grading easier. Simi- larly, individual contributions to a group project can be easier to determine than with traditional group assignments.’

Use in Distance Learning

An early use of groupware was distance learning. I discovered that Forum could be used as a respectable substitute for me on the occasions when I was

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unable to meet classes. I designed a series of assignments that could be done in my absence. That way, the interim period was not lost, and I could review the dis- cussion when I returned. In principle, I could even participate in the discussion as long as I was able to dial in. These assignments in lieu of class were simply a more-concentrated version of the type of electronic discussion that we carried on regularly; students readily participated. One semester, a student took my semi- nar, but because of a scheduling conflict, he was never able to attend a class meeting. He did, however, participate in the electronic discussion, which he found to be a workable alternative.

Some groupware products support simultaneous reading and editing by multi- ple users, allowing activities such as real time chat between participants. Although important for distance learning, such synchronous usage is unneces- sary for my purposes.8 Moreover, asynchronous discussions tend to be at a high- er cognitive level than synchronous discussions (Schrum 1996).

THE BENEFITS AND COSTS OF USING GROUPWARE

A course incorporating groupware differs in several respects, some positive and some negative, from a more traditionally taught c o ~ r s e . ~

Benefits

Groupware enables students (and the instructor) to stretch the bounds of space and time by allowing them to learn (or teach) at places and times of their own choosing-from computer labs, faculty offices, dormitories, and off-campus sites-literally anywhere accessible to the campus network and at any time of the day or night. By contrast, in a traditional class discussion, participants must be in the same place at the same time. The greater flexibility of electronic discus- sion adds to the quality and the quantity of participation.I0

Perhaps more important, groupware repositions responsibility for learning from teacher-centered to more student-centered learning opportunities. This occurs for at least two reasons. First, groupware provides a powerful tool for pro- moting student learning without the instructor's assistance, making it more like- ly that students will work together to solve problems. For example, more than once an assignment has spawned a dialog or debate between students that went far beyond the letter of the assignment and lasted for as long as a week. In one case, a student posted her final word in the form of a five-page rebuttal of her opponent's position.

Second, the change in focus occurs as a result of replacing the single perspec- tive of the instructor with the multiple perspectives of the students. As one stu- dent remarked,

Being able to read and comment on other papers allowed me to see different views on the same subject. Each perspective in itself taught me something. . . . Further- more, it helped me to explore my own understanding relative to others and then ask or answer questions about it. Seeing different perspectives in an interactive environ- ment enabled everyone to learn."

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Together, these two factors create a collaborative environment by which group members are able to “build upon one another’s ideas [to] create an outcome which may be greater than the sum of the individual contributions” (Ackerman 1995,73). This potential generates a consistently high level of engagement on the part of the students, more than I have witnessed teaching any other courses.”The engagement manifested itself in the work effort of the students, as well as their writing and discussion, both on-line and in the classroom. On a survey, students indicated that they spent between 40 and 50 percent more time working outside of class than in the average college ~0ur se . l~ All but one of the 32 students in my two seminars said that they learned more in the courses embodying groupware.

Students wrote comments on their peers’ papers far more frequently than was required. For example, during the most recent course, each participant averaged more than 50 comments or roughly 4 comments per week! Moreover, the quali- ty of the written comments was better than I had anticipated. They were notice- ably better than those obtained previously through verbal in-class discussion. The majority were thoughtful and substantive, ranging in length from a few sentences to several pages. Most students said, “You did a good job of explaining this,” or “I didn’t understand that,” or “you might try this.” One comment referred the stu- dent author to a third student’s paper. One survey respondent remarked, “Stu- dents honestly critiqued and shared information with other students. We all thought we could help each other. I never felt bad writing a ‘constructive’ criti- cism on another student’s paper because I was hoping to help them. I also hoped they would do the same for me.”

The in-class discussions for this course were also qualitatively better than those when the course was taught without Forum. Some days, after introducing the topic, I needed to say very little during class because all the important points were brought up by the students. The students did not even bother to address me but simply spoke to the group at large. Many students indicated on the survey that the in-class discussion was very useful to their learning. Two commented that “The class wouldn’t have been complete without the class discussions,” and “I feel like the class actually took place in the computer lab and the class discus- sions tilled the cracks.”

The fact that students do more work for the course (reading and writing) out- side of class means that all students should have something to say in class, and in my experience, they do. Several students who in past courses had been reluc- tant to participate in class were among the most prolific discussants in Forum’s electronic format. This phenomenon has been fairly widely observed in environ- ments characterized by computer-mediated communication (Greenlaw 1995; Strom 1995; Klemm 1996). It may be because assertive students have less oppor- tunity to dominate an electronic discussion; also, traditional gender and ethnic biases seem to be more muted. By the end of the semester, these formerly reserved students were also participating orally in class.

The improvement in discussion quality had little or no opportunity cost in terms of breadth of coverage-the classes covered as much material as in the past when I used a normal in-class discussion-based approach. One class was devoted to instruction on how to use the Forum software. Several sessions were canceled.

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because I was away from campus, but this lost time was offset by more intensive use of the time outside of class and by more efficient use of the time in class.14

Finally, the quality of the student papers improved noticeably compared to similar courses taught without groupware. This improvement probably resulted from several factors. The ease and informal nature of electronic discussion pro- moted more frequent writing. In addition, repeated writing helps the quality of the final product, both in terms of content and presentation. Perhaps most impor- tant, students indicated that they took the assignments more seriously than in a more typical course, because they expected their peers to read and possibly crit- icize their papers.I5

costs

An important difference between this way of teaching and a more traditional approach is the instructor workload, which may be somewhat more than for a tra- ditional lecture course. Instructor tasks include designing assignments; preparing for discussions, especially those in lieu of class sessions; reading student papers and student comments on those papers; and spending time administering the Forum discussion.I6 Although these tasks are not trivial, one should not overstate them because they consist of doing what an instructor should do anyway in a dis- cussion-type course--carefully evaluate students’ work, both in-class participa- tion and electronic. The additional time required is probably no more than a cou- ple of hours per week.

It is probably inevitable that structuring a course around computer software will subject the participants to computer problems. Fortunately, a large propor- tion of these problems are likely to be fixed costs. The learning curve for Forum is not particularly steep. Many students had difficulties with the software for the first assignment, but most had mastered it within one week. Furthermore, neither my college’s network system administrators nor I had had any prior experience with groupware, so we suffered predictable problems of learning by doing as the term progressed.I8 By the second course, these difficulties largely disappeared. Such problems not withstanding, unlike the vast majority of software packages I have tried, Forum exceeded my expectations from the first time I used it.

WHY GROUPWARE?

Many of the benefits of groupware can be accomplished using alternative tech- nologies such as e-mail, list-servs or newsgroups, shared access network servers, and Web pages and even using Xerox copies. None of these alternatives can gen- erate the higher-order cognitive outcomes as powerfully, quickly, easily, or effi- ciently as groupware. Discussion lists do not provide enough structure to make for a productive, focused discussion. Postings via e-mail and list-servs become intermingled with normal e-rnail messages, which require participants at least to scan all the messages to find the ones related to the discussion, and then to orga- nize the latter with previous discussion postings. Threaded discussion lists work better, but because subsequent postings are attached at the end of the document,

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it is difficult to comment on specific parts of a paper in context. Also, discussion lists can not accept structured (e.g., word processed) files or links to the Web. Shared servers can be used to create group documents, and they allow structured files, but they provide even less structure than discussion lists.

Web pages, which offer great potential for some instructional uses, are (at least as they currently exist) much less interactive than the above technologies. Stu- dents could submit papers, but only the owner of the Web page can post them. Similarly, student comments on the postings would not be easily available to all participants in the class. Groupware has the advantages of each of the alternative technologies but few of the shortcomings.

CONCLUSIONS

Groupware offers more than just a new way of doing old things. Rather, it has the potential to change dramatically the nature of teaching and learning, engag- ing students in ways not possible with traditional pedagogy. Groupware creates a setting for electronic discussion that captures the best features of in-class dis- cussion and of writing assignments. Saka and Shiigi (1996, 102) found that groupware users “indicated that they have time to digest, think through and develop ideas before entering comments.” By contrast, “in face-to-face meetings, people normally say whatever comes to mind.”

Using this technology, an instructor could employ fewer traditional class meet- ings, with the majority of the course experience occurring outside of regular class times and outside of the classroom building, at times and places largely deter- mined by each student. In such an environment, the role of the instructor would become less the source of knowledge and more the director of the learning process. Faculty wishing to promote active learning in their courses should strongly consider adding groupware to their teaching tool kit.19

The evidence cited here is largely subjective and anecdotal. An obvious direc- tion for future research is to design a more formal scheme for testing the effec- tiveness of groupware.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Greenlaw (1995). Manning (1996), or the spring 1996 discussion of the use of list-servs for teaching purposes posted on the TCG-ECON newsgroup at http://econwpa. wustl.edu:80/-tchecndg/.

2. A partial list of groupware applications would include Brainstorm, Caucus, Microsoft Exchange, SoftArc, Firstclass, Folo Views, Forum, Group Systems, Oracle Groupware Solutions, Lotus Notes, Collabra, Share. Smart 2O00, International Computers Teamware, and Vision Quest. There is no generally accepted definition of groupware; whereas all of the above fit the general defini- tion given in the text, not all allow file sharing.

3. Lotus recently released a new product called “LeamingSpace,” which is based on NOTES but is designed specifically for academic environments (see Lotus Institute 1996).

4. A July 1997 search of the ECONLit Database using the keywords groupware, computer mediat- ed learning, and computer mediated communication revealed no citations. During 1995, the TCH- ECON newsgroup held a brief discussion on groupware.

5 . For a detailed discussion of this point, see Klemm and Snell (1996). 6. Groupware minimizes problems coordinating meetings for groups, distributing information, and

writing joint papers.

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7. The electronic analog of a paper trail exists in the form of draft documents with each student author’s name attached.

8. Forum supports virtually synchronous usage-that is, users can simultaneously read and attach comments to files, but they cannot simultaneously edit them.

9. My evaluation of groupware is the result of my experience using Forum over two semesters. More specifically, it is based on two pieces of evidence: my perceptions of the quality of student learning, with and without the software, and the results of a detailed survey my students com- pleted after each semester. The survey questions and results are available upon request.

10. Saka and Shiigi (1996, 102) in evaluating their use of groupware, note that “active participation in the electronic discussion was attributed to it being very convenient for individuals to add their input instead of only being able to do so at set times.”

11 . Jonassen et al. made a similar observation (1995, 16): “As a result of contact with new or differ- ent perspectives, these activities may contribute to a higher level of learning through cognitive restructuring or conflict resolution, leading to new ways of understanding the material.’’

12. Ackermann (1995) describes a similar phenomenon in a business context with participants becoming more committed to the decisionmaking process.

13. The survey asked how much more time students spent working outside of class than in the aver- age course at our institution. Answers ranged from 10-100 percent more, with the average being 47 percent in the first course and 42 percent in the second.

14. Ackermann (1995) and Strom (1995) indicate that the use of groupware can improve the effi- ciency of face-to-face meetings.

15. Klemm (1996) makes a similar point. 16. This time was spent dealing with the normal PC and network computer problems, as well as

“housecleaning,” that is, making sure students posted their articles in the right places on the Forum, fixing student errors, solving problems with passwords, and so forth. Although these chores were time consuming, they declined over the course of the year as students and the instructor learned from their mistakes. For example, I recommend assigning Forum passwords in some easy to remember way, such as Social Security numbers. Similarly, it is good practice to avoid giving students write-and-link access to the conference homepage.

17. A majority of my students identified computer problems as the major weakness of the course. 18. It took me the better part of one day to learn Forum well enough to set up the first conference.

The second time, I spent about two hours; the third time, less than one hour. One also gets bet- ter at the housecleaning.

19. Groupware might also enhance lecture-based courses by creating an opportunity for discussion.

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& Technology 28 (March): 72-75. Everett, D. R., and T. C. Ahern. 1994. Computer-mediated communication as a teaching tool: A case

study. Journal of Research on Computing in Education 26 (Spring): 336-37. Greenlaw, S. A. 1995. Using e-mail, gopher, and other internet tools to enhance your teaching.

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’96 Conference in Philadelphia, October 8.

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