The first time this happened was during the group project for DoCS, providing case studies of organisations using particular technologies. Anne told us that we only had to make the case studies relevant to DoCS’ context. However, Brett told us that they should all be ‘human service’ examples. Like aged home care organisations, drug rehabilitation centres, etc. We nearly had to rewrite three quarters of our assignment because of this, until we realised … Brett wanted us to use these examples so that he could take them to build a business case for whatever technology/ies they ended up using. So, we decided that DoCS cutting and pasting assignments that we hand in to uni would constitute a breach of Intellectual Property rules and therefore it doesn’t matter if they are not in the same industry as DoCS is.

The second time this happened was last week, when Brett ran the class because Anne was at a conference. In this class, we were supposed to choose a training program to use in an individual assignment. Over this week, we had to storyboard a high level e-learning alternative to the face-to-face program. The whole thing. Only, we weren’t told this by Brett. Brett told us that we had to think of e-learning alternatives to individual activities in the program. For example, ‘this bit of the program can be completed a week before the face-to-face program using this technology’. Apparently, DoCS’ aim is to reduce the face-to-face time (not necessarily to eliminate it) and to provide training ‘options’. This made storyboarding practically impossible – how do you storyboard an e-learning program which isn’t actually an e-learning program? So most of us spent last class in a confused stupor, wondering exactly what we were supposed to be doing.

My (long-winded, I know) point is that we are recieving two sets of direction and it is not helping us to work effectively. I think that the problem may lie in how well uni and DoCS have discussed their objectives, deliverables and particularly their assumptions in regards to this project. For instance, DoCS assumes that we will be able to find case studies directly related to their industry and that we will not be able to produce an entire e-learning program. They believe that the group work assignment is a deliverable that they can take for their own and their objective is to provide e-learning options, rather than an extensive e-learning program.

I think that this is happened for a number of reasons:

• Everyone in our group contributed notes to our assignment, but emailed them to each other instead of writing them on the wiki, so there was no writing on the wiki early on.
• Once we had written all our notes, we had one person write up the ‘assignment’ so that it would read with one writing style the whole way through.
• We didn’t post to the wiki until everything was written out.

So while it was collaborative, it wasn’t really an organic or synergic learning experience.