Course Description - This course is designed for you to study the complexities of communicating (writing, speaking, reading, listening) when in groups, particularly small decision-making groups. We will primarily focus on communication within small groups of 5-10 members.| We will study how groups are a system within larger systems, specifically the context of the group's purpose & cultural influences.| You will examine the relationship of observed members' verbal & nonverbal behaviors during interaction to that of group structure, leadership and followership dynamics, group climates, functions and outcomes. Topics include the impact of socio-cultural and institutional features on small group communicative practices, leadership emergence and role enactment, quality of problem solving strategies, and the transactional nature of communication.|

The Communication Discipline is an odd one in that communicating is an assumed behavior, assumed to just happen.| Thus, whenever someone pays specific attention to her or his communicator choices, the effort is thought to be a concious manipulation coercive intention.| This makes studying communication odd too, and this means we will study several notions that people new to studying communication, tend to have about communication.|

One of the more troublesome of these ideas is communicative-correctness, which refers to the misunderstanding that there is a right way to communicate and a right way to think about communicating. The person confuses competent communication with being correct, polite, over-nice, etc.| See the Myths about Communication in the link: Understanding Communication; Myths & Misunderstandings about Communication; etc. (How Can a Communication course be taught online?)

Three Course Learning Objectives

Objective 1: Understand communication - You will develop and/or deepen your understanding of communication. You may think understanding communication is obvious, and in some ways it is, however there are a number of persistent mistakes, myths and misunderstandings about it which interfere with studying communication ideas.| | You will study to understand:

·        Communicators make choices.| We choose the type, frequency, quality, etc. of our| communication behavior in every interaction.

·        Communication is behavior: speaking; listening; writing and reading behavior choices.

o          We are inexperienced to experienced communicators.

o          Being an experienced communicator may or may not transfer from one situation to another or one group to another or one task to another.

·        Group members~R message choices and message interpretations are the primary basis on which| a group will function.

·        Communicator choices create and maintain groups~R norms, rules, roles, leadership, decision making, task production, conflict and conflict management, etc.|

Objective 2: Understand group communication concepts and theories - You will apply your understanding of communication concepts to groups, particularly small groups.| You will study to understand:

§          Groups as open-systems; the transactional process of group interaction

§          Understand how individual-influencing behaviors become group-influencing behaviors, and the reverse, how a group influences the individual.

§          Understand the concepts of communicator competencies in face-to-face groups compared to online groups.

§          Develop a new or expanded understanding of effective leadership, including:

§        How leadership emerges as part of the group process and as such, consists of actual behaviors in specific contexts, which have the potential to be group-influencing.

§        The need for adapting behaviors for flexibility, efficiency, goal attainments, encouraging competency in group members, appropriate use of roles, etc.|

§        Understanding mutual influence as it occurs in context (leadership ßà followership dynamic).

Objective 3: Application - Develop or improve your abilities to use theories to analyze your own and others~R behavior.| | You will develop or improve your skills of observation, assessment and evaluation of verbal and nonverbal behavior within your current or recent group experiences.

§          Develop the abilities to recognize and describe behavior which contribute or deter the task & transactional aspects of group communication;

§          Develop or improve your articulation of communication concepts in order to demonstrate your understanding of:|

§        the verbal & nonverbal behaviors of your own and of others

§        how group influencing behaviors occur within specific contexts

§        competent communication

Required Textbook: Communicating in small groups: Principles and practice (8^th ed.) Beebe, S. A. & Masterson, J. T. (2006).| | | San Francisco, CA: Pearson, Allyn & Bacon.

Textbook Student Companion Site.| We have a web-based companion site with this text.|

Use of the Companion Site is optional. Many textbooks have web-based resources available. For our purposes, the practice tests and resource links are the most useful features in this Companion Site. You will find the Multiple Choice and True/False practice tests for each chapter very helpful when studying to take one of our exams. You will find the Companion Site in the Syllabus and Testing Information links.

Schedule for Course Concepts and Required Reading

Week One - Understanding verbal and nonverbal communication; Introductions to Communication in Groups & Teams| | | |

Chs. 1 & 6

Week Two - Small Group Communication Theory

Ch. 2

Week Three - Group Development/Formation

Ch. 3

Week Four - Group Development continued à Role Emergence;| Leadership; norms and rules

Chs. 4 & 12

Week Five - Leadership continued; leadership ßà followership

Ch. 12 continued

Week Six - continue with content from Wks. 4 & 5

Week Seven - Managing Conflict

Chs. 5 & 7

Week Eight - Working together: decision-making and problem-solving;| competencies in managing tasks

Chs. 8, 9, 10 & 11 and

Appendix A

Week Nine - Working together: decision-making and problem-solving continued

Chs. 8, 9, 10 & 11 continued

Week Ten - Assessment & Evaluation of Group Process and Task Outcomes

Graded Assignments

Due Dates

% of Course Grade

Weekly Postings

2 postings per week

50%

Virtual Group Project

Variable-see assignment info

25%

Midterm Exam

Week 6

25%

Final Exam

Week 11

Statement of Completion and Course Failure information: All grading criteria must be fully completed in order to pass this course.|

 Regarding the weekly postings: Missing six postings will result in failing the course, regardless of your overall assignment score and grades in other course assignments. The Weekly Posting Assignment is the most significant assignment in this communication study experience. The course failure penalty is in place to emphasize that we are replacing classroom time, but not the benefits gained from weekly course discussions which incorporate lectures and skill building into one assignment and missing postings is roughly equated to missing class. Please see details about this group-learning method in CMC courses in the Posting assignment description. 

Incomplete Grading Option. If you have completed 75% of the course work at a ~SC~T or better grade, you may be eligible to take an Incomplete Grade. Department of Communication Incomplete Policy:| Incomplete Grades will not be given due to late work.| Incompletes must be formally arranged via a contract which can be obtained in the Department of Communication Office, NH 23 or in our Syllabus link.

Note to anyone taking the course Pass/No Pass: There is NO difference in the criteria for Pass/No Pass grading. All of the above applies to you too. Please do not make the mistake of calculating the overall percentages of total assignments and skipping some if you see would pass based on % values. Each assignment must be fully completed in order to pass this course.

Timing:

·       Each exam will be open for one day.

o          Midterm: Week 6

o          Final: Week 11

·       Once opened, you will have two-hours in which to take the exam.|

Test content and format:

·          Testing is based on the textbook material, assignment goals/objectives and course objectives.

·          From the text:

·        The Midterm Exam will cover:| | Chs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12

·        The Final Exam will cover:| | Chs. 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and Appendix. A

Studying for the exams:

·        Go to the Testing Information link à Basics about the Testing in this Course: Midterm and Final Exams.

·        Take the True/False and Multiple Choice practice tests in the Student Companion Site for the textbook.

Skills Assignment: Competent Communicating in a Virtual Task Group

You will work in groups of 4-5 members to complete a series of tasks. The end product is not the primary aim of this project, in fact, you are likely to find it simplistic. The topic direction will actually serve as a study tool for our course concepts, but the Project is a skills assignment, and the tasks are prompts or methods to use competent communicating in your virtual group.|

Too often students working on group projects skip over the procedure and interaction details to just get the job done.| The group project in our course is designed to reduce this tendency.| Realistically, we cannot eliminate it given the busy of everyone~Rs lives, but I want you to keep in mind that since this is a study of communicating in groups, our main attention is going to be on the nature of that communication.|

 So, the purpose of the project experience is two-fold:

1.       By participating in a virtual task group experience, you will have an in-progress or in-action study ~V your virtual group will be an immediate application for the study of the concepts we are covering in our course.

2.       You will assess and evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as a communicator in a virtual task group.

Group membership: I will do a typical ~Scounting off~T approach to form the groups.| At the end of Week 3, I will form the groups based on the students who are active in the course.| By active I mean students who are posting regularly.

Location of Group Meetings:

·        Asynchronous meeting location-| Once the Virtual Project Groups are formed, I will create a private posting area for each group.| You will find your group in the same link where you go for the Weekly Postings.| It will be clearly marked and only the members of your group, the T.A.s and I will have access to it.

·        Synchronous meetings in Chat Rooms

Virtual Group Tasks: You are going to complete a series of tasks together.| Most tasks will be similar in length to the exercises you will complete for topic prep for the Weekly Posting assignment.

 Specific criteria for these tasks are in the Virtual Group Project link.

The Weekly Posting Assignment is the most significant to this study experience, which is why it has the most value for your course grade.| It is also the main ~Sseat-time~T replacement course activity.| It is designed to serve as a facsimile to the F2F lecture and discussion classroom experience.

The weekly posting assignment is a virtual study/discussion group experience.| It is asynchronous participation which means, similar to Internet message boards, you will communicate with your group members through delayed feedback and input.| This form of computer-mediated communication (CMC) does not replicate the quick ebb and flow of face-to-face (F2F) or Chat Room interaction, but it does carry some of the same interaction characteristics.| These are useful for the study group experience you will have in this course in your Discussion Group, and to some degree, your group for the Virtual Project.|

 The benefits of group learning are not lost in this fully online course, for two key reasons:

1.       Use of CMC is almost requisite in workplaces today and it is becoming more utilized for course work and group projects. Thus, learning effective CMC interaction skills is becoming as important as is learning public speaking skills or team decision making skills.| In this posting assignment, the ~Svisibility~T of your work and that of your group members will provide the basis for the studying of course concepts and for competent feedback exchanges with each other.| You will produce an informal type of accountability with each other, similar to what work groups experience.| By providing adequate feedback, useful suggestions, cautions on directions, a wide-range of insights, clarifying writing, encouragement on ideas, etc., you and the members of your group will engage in the course material with each other.

2.       In addition, one of the more difficult concepts to teach about communication in groups is the understanding that our own communicator behavior, style, practices, etc. are cultural norms.| It tends to be hard for students to understand that no matter how personal and/or individualistic our communicating seems to us or no matter how busy or important we regard our own schedules or no matter how much we think, ~Sthis is just the way I am~T, we share the experience and communicate similarly with the other members of the culture.| In this course, you will understand this as a characteristic of open-systems theory, which we will use to explain the nature of communicating within groups. We learned our communicating style as we learned other cultural (and social) norms.| This does not mean we do not experience communicating in groups personally. It means we experience our culture in very personal and social ways.|

Understanding this idea of culture is personal (similar to the personal is political) is significant in a communication course because you need to be able to observe, assess and evaluate communicating in expansive and complex ways. You need to be able to speak and write about communicating in expansive and complex ways.| You need to be able to take in the many factors contributing to the manner in which people in this culture communicate with each other when they share tasks, common goals or work together. In a F2F course, this would be emphasized repeatedly, thus our CMC classroom and the posting (and virtual project) assignment will serve to accomplish this.

Discussion Groups:| Discussion groups were randomly selected based on my original enrollment roster. As this changes in the first weeks, I add/subtract memberships.| Each discussion group has been assigned a Teaching Assistant.| |

Posting Topics:| Content we will study/discuss

·          You will find the instructions each week in the TOPICS link.

·          The topic assignments are similar to those you might participate in a face-to-face classroom experience: lectures of course concepts, use of textbook material and discussion exercises in groups.

·          We will cover the basics of communication in groups as an area of study in each of the weekly posting topics.

o          Topics are geared toward you accomplishing the Course Learning Objectives

o          Each concept area adds to the understanding of the next.

·          The posting assignment content, structure and timelines, have been established to promote interaction with the members of your virtual discussion group.| While you learn the course concepts and, and while doing so, you will assist others to do the same.| |