COOP Implementation - The Work Term Blog

The studies described in the literature presented many options for the design of a blog activity.  Students can use individual blogs that they make accessible to all their peers and faculty.  An alternative presented is to divide the students into teams and confine collaboration to the students in the team.  A final option presented is to establish one blog for the class that all students contribute to.  

For the COOP work terms, students will establish their own blog as this will encourage their focus on the role of the blog in facilitating their individual reflection on their learning experience.  At this stage, it is proposed that a decision about whether to have students make their blog accessible to all students or divide students into teams who will share their blogs will be determined on a term by term basis.  The reason for that decision is that the number of students completing a work term each academic term can vary considerably.  For example, in the 2013-2014 academic year, COOP registration numbers were as follows: 18 students in the Fall term, 14 in the Winter Term and 53 in the Spring/Summer term.  In this instance, during the Fall and Winter terms it would seem that in order to encourage active critical analysis it would be appropriate to grant access to all blogs to all students.  In a term with 53 students enrolled, it may be more prudent to divide the students into teams who would share access to their blogs only with each other.  This would make the review of the blogs of their peers a more manageable activity for the students.

Students registered in work terms will meet in a computer lab for registration.  Given that for many students a considerable amount of time can have passed since they completed COOP 290, part of that session will be a review of the use of blogger.com.  The students will access their blogger.com account or re-establish one if they have deleted their account and set up their work term blog.  This session will also allow the students who will be completing a work term to meet each other so they are introduced to the people they will be collaborating with in their blogs.  In the introductory session, the requirements for the blog assignment will also be set out.  As well, students will create their first blog entry which will ask the students to introduce themselves and analyze their expectations for the work term. 

The students will be required to complete a minimum of five posts.  The first will be the post they complete during the registration session.  The other four posts will be due at the end of each month of the term.  Each post will have a theme provided by the instructor that students will be asked to reflect on in order to focus their analysis.  In addition to the five assigned posts, students will also be required to contribute a minimum of two substantive comments to the blogs of other students.  Faculty will provide feedback for each post in order to assist students in improving their reflective ability.