Whether face-to-face or online, my courses are based on collaboration and group work. I emphasize close contact and genuine collaboration with group members from the very beginning of the semester. My Welcome Email, Blackboard’s “Start Here” page, Syllabus, and Course Calendar encourage students to make friends since they will be each other's allies throughout the semester. There are two basic ways students collaborate with their peer group members: 1. by discussing reading assignments and 2. by giving each other feedback on their papers. Additionally, they view and comment on the each other's assignments posted in their Personal Folder. On the Discussion Board, each student has a forum of his or her own to post all of the assignments.

Collaboration and group work cannot be successful unless instructors pay attention to community building. Complete strangers are unlikely to share specific details in their essays about their personal life, which might potentially deprive them of the best topics for their papers. Instead of giving honest, constructive feedback on peers’ papers, strangers will only make polite comments that will probably be perceived as useless and unhelpful by the authors. To establish the psychological foundation of future collaboration, students have to get to know each other. There are several assignments that are designed to build a community of writers. Students are asked to create their Blackboard homepage and use it as a personal introduction for peers and instructor. They will then read their classmates' homepages and respond to one another commenting on things the have in common. Another ice-breaker is the Silly Syllabus Quiz which is created with Blackboard's assessment tool. In addition to making contact and getting to know each other, the purpose of this humorous assignment is to make sure that students familiarize themselves with the syllabus and other posted information regrading course requirements, policies, and procedures. Students are encouraged to complete the quiz with a partner or their entire peer group if physically possible. If a face-to-face meeting is not feasible, they call each other on the phone while looking at the quiz on their computers so that they can discuss the quiz items. In addition to the Cybercafe mentioned under Principle 1, students can make friends and bond by making posts to a Discussion Board forum called "Why I Am Concerned About This Course." This forum allows students to express their fears and anxieties about the course at the beginning of the semester and then find reassurance in responses by peers and instructor that the course is going to be not only do-able, but also rewarding.

When discussing reading assignments related to the theory and practice of creative nonfiction, each student makeswhat we today call a blog post to the group blog based on his or her own interpretation of the text. In previous years, "blogging" withing Blackboard was limited to group forum on the Discussion Board. Since students' life experiences, backgrounds, and cultures can be very different, they learn from each other by sharing their unique points of view and by being exposed to ideas that they themselves may not have thought of. The expectations regarding the length, frequency and quality of reading responses are included in the Syllabus and on Blackboard together with examples of model posts. After an initial 300-word post, peers respond to two group members.

During the paper workshop cycle, group members are expected to provide constructive criticism to their peers so that the authors can revise their text before submitting it for a grade. A Tegrity video recording explains to students how to give and receive feedback. It is the group’s responsibility to make sure that each student's draft has the best potential to earn a good grade. Reliability in group work is key because peers’ grades might depend on group members' contribution. Deadlines are taken very seriously during the peer review process. Students also have to be courteous, honest, and professional when interacting with their peers. At the end of the semester, each student will send me a confidential email in which they evaluate their group members’ performance. This evaluation will have an impact on the final grade students receive. In general, students appreciate the possibility of working with a group and not in isolation.