Group Work, Enjoyable?

I’m sure a lot of other people feel the same way, but when I hear group project I just think “ugh”. The hassle of working out scheduling to meet up with group members, agreeing on how to accomplish the project, then relying on people you hardly know to get the work done to a standard that is acceptable to you. That doesn’t sound like a pleasant time to me, but I am pleased to say that this group presentation was more than bearable. All of the conflicts we came across were smoothly resolved, and everyone did what they needed to do in a timely manner.

After receiving our group assignments in class, we quickly learned that we were divided. Half of our group was interested in pre-health careers, while the other half were interested in finance. Instead of choosing one way or another, we integrated our careers and focused on a small medical practice. This choice allowed to flexibility of the both financial and medical aspects as well as the specificity of a certain type of environment and common communication issues involving jargon.

The next thing we had to face was our group’s communication with each other. We had exchanged emails and started initially with that, but then quickly switched over to a Facebook thread, which was very efficient. We tried setting up a meeting but with everyone’s busy schedules only five out of six of our group members were able to attend, and one had to leave early. During this time we tried to just lay down a general idea of what direction we were going to take the presentation in. We chose to open and close with a skit to make our presentation full circle, and explain our communication issue through a powerpoint. Since we knew it was hard to our group to all meet together, we chose to create our presentation on GoogleDocs. We came up with the general headings for all the slides, and then everyone was assigned to their own slide that they could finish on their own time. This was the first time I had ever used GoogleDocs, and I really enjoyed it. It was so simple and made things a lot easier for everyone to compile one presentation.

We all met one more time before the presentation just to finalize everything, and make sure everyone knew their roles and the order we were doing things in to ensure that everything would run smoothly. There was no real true leader to our group, everyone had good ideas to input and was willing to volunteer to take on some part of the project whether it be performing in the skit or drawing up the outline of our presentation.

In the end, this is probably a group project where I spent the most time working face to face with the other members, but at the same time one of the most successful. We have technology to attribute that success to.