UC3M

The concept behind the collaborative work is to solve a given problem through the balance between personal work and sharing these solutions and taking decisions within the team. The idea is not simply to solve the problem all together, neither that a team member solves the problem and the rest give their approval. In the concrete case of collaborative work withing a course, the main objective is not even solving the problem, but the problem is used as the scenario to identify your learning needs, put together your efforts and work toward a solution.

The difficulty of team work is in finding that balance between the individual contributions of each team member and the exchange of opinions, views, proposals and solutions in the team meetings. A group with members that do a great individual work (each one does the work previously decided) but the group meetings are used only to connect these ideas is no working properly. Analogously, a team in which members do not work individually and the work is done only in the team meetings is not working properly either.

An effective team is the one that achieves objectives that are beyond the reach of each of its members individually but they are not possible to achieve without the individual contributions. This balance, although easy to state and see, typically is fairly tricky to reach, and no magic recipe, nor fixed steps are defined that guarantee success. However, it is possible to review certain ingredients and techniques that, although they are not a guarantee, facilitate or increase the probability of achieving this balance.