Classmates that submit their homework at the last min. and you need to critique it.

[soliloquy]

Have you ever tried to get your homework complete which requires you to critique or collaborate with another person in your class? Have you ever worked with a group or another person who waited until the last possible moment to submit things so that you were left with just a day to give a response.

Any stories to tell?

[Tedium]

I've never had to collaborate with anyone at COSC, but someone just turned in their final discussion board post today for my Eng. 302 course. Class ended on the 8th.

In my my experience teachers are usually pretty understanding about stuff like that. It is supremely annoying, though.

[bricabrac]

I've experienced situations like this in my online courses. Usually students are traveling on business or on vacation. Or just forgot. The instructor was always made aware assignments would be late. The instructor sends out a reminder email to submit all missing DF posts and/or WA's when they are getting ready to close out the course. That's when you'll see missing DF posts appear. There is a due date for all final grades to be submitted to the college. At TESC it is now 2 wks after the semester ends. (This is separate from your online grade report.) If you want full credit for DF, you get those entries posted. Doesn't matter if you have not responded to a few posts or no one has had a chance to respond to your late entries.

If you've received an assignment that does not allow enough time for you to review, you just notify the instructor and they give you the extra time needed. I've had this happen at my CC, the group assignments were always just on time (finishing up in class), late, or had pieces missing because someone wouldn't pull their weight. No big deal. The instructor always seemed to expect this situation and made necessary adjustments.

[Westerner]

I've never had to collaborate with anyone at COSC, but someone just turned in their final discussion board post today for my Eng. 302 course. Class ended on the 8th.

And if you're in a small class, sometimes you can't find enough people to reply to before the due date! But thankfully that hasn't been a big problem for me. Either way, just post, and reply to what you can by the listed times.

I haven't had experience with collaboration or group projects as described in the OP, though. That would be so frustrating.

[Kintsukuroi]

Yep, that happens in my online classes. It's mostly a problem when the class is split into small groups. What I do is contact the other students in my group and CC the instructor (or email the instructor separately). That way I have proof that I am trying to complete the assignment. I've also contacted the instructor before and asked whether I should respond to someone else outside my assigned group for discussion assignments or ask the instructor with how they would like me to move forward with the assignment when the other students are not fulfilling their part. There have also been times where I have completed group assignments by myself if necessary. I haven't lost points yet on assignments by showing this good faith effort to complete an assignment.

[Bibby]

Yeah, I've had some online or hybrid classes where you had to respond to a certain number of discussion posts, and sometimes so many students waited until the last minute or put the bare minimum amount of effort into their posts that it was hard to find anything to reply to. I haven't had that issue in recent online/hybrid classes, but it's still part of why I prefer taking in-person classes whenever possible.

I've never had a group project where everyone did what they were supposed to, and I've always had to spend the final weekend doing other people's work even when I've warned them repeatedly, both in person and through e-mail, that they need to get off their bottoms. In my most recent group project, I was allowed to choose all of my teammates, but only one of them really pulled their weight. One guy took an insane courseload while working full-time and dropped the class, one girl got sick - so sick that her eyes literally turned red - the week after our first class and never fully recovered, and another guy had perpetual writer's block. The latter two didn't touch the document in Google Drive until the final weekend, and they didn't add much. Everything turned out OK in the end, and I got a 100 on both the project and the peer evaluation, but the process was quite frustrating at times.

[clep3705]

I have seen online programs advertise that their program has no group work. That is a selling point that does catch my attention and cause me to keep reading.

I've seen two different implementations of deadlines for replying to posts. Sometimes all posts and all replies have the same due date. That doesn't always turn out well. Other courses have one due date for initial posts and a later due date for replies. That seems to be the most practical solution.