Micro Certificate: Understanding and Teaching the Collaboration Competency (Basic)

Course synopsis

Collaboration Competency for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD): Designing, Teaching and Assessing Collaboration

Most courses include group work, but few assess collaboration. This fully online, self-paced course shows lecturers from any discipline how to develop and assess Collaboration, one of the eight cross-cutting ESD competencies defined by UNESCO (2017). Participants first learn to tell collaboration apart from group work. They then choose a topic with genuinely competing interests and select teaching methods that build conflict between perspectives into the task. Next, they write an assessment brief that produces individual evidence and adapt a four-criterion rubric to their own discipline. The four criteria are Representing other positions, Who is absent, Handling disagreement and Individual contribution. Finally, they audit the design for alignment and moderation.

The course has six one-hour modules grouped into two micro certificates, Basic and Intermediate, which together lead to a macro certificate. Each module has videos, notes, an activity in Sinergi – The Collaboration Workbench, and a quiz. Participants finish with a Collaboration assessment plan for a course they already teach.

Module overview

1. What Collaboration Is, and Is Not. Covers the UNESCO definition and its five abilities, and separates collaboration from group work, participation, agreement and communication skill.
2. The Four Criteria and Competing Interests. Turns the five abilities into four markable criteria and shows how to pick a topic in which informed people want different outcomes.
3. Pedagogies that Develop Collaboration. Presents three design rules and eleven teaching methods, used as a practice activity followed by an assessed activity.
4. Designing the Assessment. Shows how to write a four-clause brief that produces individual, non-divisible evidence, and how to avoid three common marking traps.
5. Building and Adapting the Rubric. Shows how to adapt the descriptors to a discipline, with levels separated by the quality of reasoning rather than by counting.
6. Alignment, Moderation and Audit. Traces the chain from SDG to a student’s script, sets out the moderation schedule, and covers the five ways a Collaboration claim fails at audit.