Discover the Benefits of Collaboration
Did you know that hundreds of students before you have already gone through these same steps and questions? You’re now part of a large community of OpenClassrooms students and alumni!
Being active in the OpenClassrooms community can have several positive impacts:
On your motivation—talking to others can help you regain confidence when you’re feeling discouraged.
On your learning—by working with other students to solve problems and by sharing what you know with the community, you’ll progress faster!
Collaborating with other students will also help prepare you for your future career. It means practicing your soft skills, particularly your ability to work in a team, synthesize your knowledge, and communicate with others. These skills are highly sought after in the job market! It will also help you grow your professional network. You’ll make connections with people who already have jobs in the field (or will soon have), and these relationships can be important.
Explore Different Collaborative Practices
Practice 1: Ask Questions to Other Students Working on the Same Project
When you read other students’ questions, you’ll realize many of them have the same doubts as you at certain key moments in the training program. You can take advantage of this fact and learn from each other! I encourage you to:
ask any questions you have in the group dedicated to your path or to the project you’re currently working on.
respond to other students’ questions if you know the answer.
share any helpful resources you find, so that others can benefit from them.
Practice 2: Organize Group Sessions on Projects
You can also form a study group with other students. The group can meet via videoconference and learn together.
How do I go about organizing a study session?
I suggest following these steps:
Before the Session
Start by setting a goal for the session: What do you want to learn? What do you want to get out of it? It could be finding solutions to problems encountered in the project, or just getting a better grasp on the concepts and methods you’re learning on the course.
Post a message to see whether three other people would be interested in a group session. Be sure to include the purpose of the session.
Set a 1–1.5 hour time slot for your next session.
During the Session
Here are two examples of typical session agendas. You can adapt these depending on your goal.
Goal | Agenda |
Work together to overcome difficulties encountered on your current project |
|
Get a better grasp on the concepts and methods in a course |
|
After the Session
Don’t forget to share your notes with the group after the session so everyone remembers what you learned together!
Practice 3: Find Your Buddy
Your buddy should be someone you trust and who can discuss your progress with you. In your case, it might be another student starting at the same time as you, so you can help each other succeed! You can have regular meetings with your buddy (at least every two weeks) to share your respective goals and discuss the challenges you encounter.
To find your buddy, you can post a message to the group. For example:
Hello! I just started my training in [...]. Would anyone be interested in buddying up? The idea would be to check in regularly to talk about our goals and progress, try and help each other stay motivated, and stay on track with our work. It could be as simple as a weekly phone call!
Collaborate Without Plagiarizing
But when you’re first learning to code, isn’t it common practice to copy existing code?
That’s true! Developers often work in collaboration with other people and are sometimes required to rework existing code. For the purposes of your training, this should only be done if certain rules are followed. Here’s a list of do's and don’ts when it comes to collaborative work.
Do (because it’s collaboration) | Don’t (because it’s cheating) |
Share your screen with other students to discuss your code and explain how you arrived at your solution. | Send your code to another student and suggest that they copy it verbatim. |
Share your repository with another student and ask them questions about the parts you’re having trouble with. | Post your code publicly to an online group to ask for help. |
Collaborate with students who are working on the same project as you. | Ask for ready-made solutions from students who have already completed the project you’re working on. |
Help a student understand a concept they’re struggling with. | Give fully functional code to another student without helping them understand it. |
When you’re looking at someone else’s code, make sure you understand it fully before using it as inspiration for your own work. | Copy and paste code without understanding it (and without being able to explain it to your mentor or assessor). |
Listen to feedback from other students, even on a working piece of code. There’s always more than one right answer. | Share your code as the ideal solution that everyone else should follow. |
Let’s Recap!
The community is a powerful resource for motivation and learning.
With Slack, our collaborative tool, you can connect with other students on the same path and project as you whenever you want. You can ask the community questions, organize group sessions, or even find a training buddy for mutual support.
Collaborating doesn’t mean copying. Your deliverables and work should be yours alone—personal and unique.
You should now have a clear picture of what’s awaiting you on your training program. Let’s see what you can remember about what we’ve covered so far. Find out by taking the quiz!
