{"id":627,"date":"2018-11-11T12:58:47","date_gmt":"2018-11-11T12:58:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bjornonl.wordpress.com\/?p=47"},"modified":"2018-11-11T12:58:47","modified_gmt":"2018-11-11T12:58:47","slug":"the-freerider-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/2018\/11\/11\/the-freerider-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"The freerider problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oh, aren&#8217;t they annoying, those people who try to get the benefits without paying the cost? Who think they can just float by, without contributing?\u00a0In online learning, a key idea is that education should be free and that it doesn&#8217;t cost anything to share knowledge. So if everything is free, there shouldn&#8217;t be a freerider problem?<\/p>\n<p>Of course there are. Hall and Buzwell (2013) survey students from all faculties at an Australian university. They find that the free-rider problem is the greatest concern of group work in all fields of studies. Having students in a course who don&#8217;t contribute to the discussion, who get by with least possible effort, makes online groupwork a less dynamic process, and it can certainly be discouraging for more ambitious students.<\/p>\n<p>How can we deal with the freerider problem in online group work? The ONL181 approach, as I interpret it, has the following elements that address the problem:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Create a sense of community early on.<\/strong> When you know the others in your group, you feel bad if you don&#8217;t contribute, because everyone else have to work more.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Rotate responsibilities.<\/strong> By taking turns in being the group leader, everyone is eventually forced to take a leading role.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mix group tasks with individual tasks.<\/strong> Because everyone has to write blog posts, there is no way to skip a topic. Participating actively in the group work makes the individual task easy, because you already know the materials.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Monitor the activity<\/strong>. Facilitators participate in the group work and make sure that everyone is active and that the work is on track.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Indeed, several of these features in the ONL181 course are in line with the recommendations of Brindley, Blaschke and Walti (2009). For example, they emphasize the important of creating communities, to monitor the progression, and scaffolding. Hall and Buzwell (2013) add that it is important to identify free-rider problems early on in a course, to avoid later frustration when the activity is assessed.<\/p>\n<p>In my own experience, course design is important to handle the problem. At least in courses with a scale of grades, it is important that students can show their individual skills in tasks that are parallel to the group work (like with the blog posts in the ONL course).<\/p>\n<p><strong>References<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. &amp; Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. <em>The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning<\/em>, 10(3).<\/p>\n<p>Hall, D., &amp; Buzwell, S. (2013). The problem of free-riding in group projects: Looking beyond social loafing as reason for non-contribution. <em>Active Learning in Higher Education<\/em>, 14(1), 37-49.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oh, aren&rsquo;t they annoying, those people who try to get the benefits without paying the cost? Who think they can just float by, without contributing?&nbsp;In online learning, a key idea is that education should be free and that it doesn&rsquo;t cost anything to share knowledge. So if everything is free, there shouldn&rsquo;t be a freerider &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bjornonl.wordpress.com\/2018\/11\/11\/the-freerider-problem\/\">Continue reading<span> &#8220;The freerider problem&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":637,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions\/637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hhk3.kau.se\/onl181-blogposts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}