Sloan-C

The Delphi Process as a Collaborative Learning Method Murray Turoff, Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Zheng Li, Yuanqiong Wang, and Hee-Kyung Cho
Information Systems Department, http://is.njit.edu, New Jersey Institute of Technology
(excerpt from forthcoming Sloan-C anthology)

The Delphi Method is a process that allows all the members of a class to participate in a class-wide, collaborative, structured learning exercise that can:

Improve idea generation.
Self organize the contributed content.
Facilitate equal participation of all students.
Reduce information overload problems for large classes.
Facilitate collaborative problem solving.
Expose disagreements for focusing the discussion.
Facilitate comprehensive idea evaluation.

Most Delphis are organized around the three phases of exploring, evaluating, and probing. However, some more complex structures for planning and decision analysis can go to five or six phases. Common to almost any type of problem situation is the initial step of compiling one or more lists of contributions of a given type. For example, in a typical decision problem the lists that are needed are:

Table 1: Typical list types

Type of List	Voting Scale	Example
Objectives	Importance, Measurability	Getting a college education, Goals of an organization
Criteria	Importance, Measurability	For a presidential candidate Buying a house, Choosing a college
Solutions, Actions, Decisions, Policy Resolutions	Desirability Feasibility	Components of a national medical drug program, Potential products for a company
Consequences, Inferences, Events	Likelihood, Significance	Long term impacts of modern terrorism on U.S. Society
Observations, Viewpoints, Pro/Con Arguments	Validity, Importance	Reasons for the U.S. Civil War, Scenarios of any type, Rationales
Interpretations, role playing	Validity, Significance	How would a selection of US Presidents reflect on a current political issue?

Objectives of the solution to a decision issue
Criteria for evaluating a solution to the problem
Possible solutions for the problem
Consequences of those solutions

The possible list generations that one can treat as a Delphi process are completely open ended. Respondents may propose rewordings of specific list entries and the group may quickly vote on those amendments, much as in Robert’s Rules of Order.

It takes some explanation to help students realize that the goal of a voting process is not meant to be a single vote to reach a final view on the item such as occurs in the typical survey or election. In fact, it is usually considered that having vote changes in the neighborhood of 25% to 33% of the vote is a sign of success in terms of getting many of the participants to change due to the collective insights provided. Even the experts can learn in such a process!

Assessing the achieved course objectives helps not only the students to review what they have learned, but also helps instructors to improve teaching. One historical view of Delphi was that it could considerably reduce the amount of verbal discussion that usually occurs in meetings. For example, it was common to have a great deal of discussion about some point of view that everyone already agreed about. This occurs in both face-to-face class discussions and online. The use of a Delphi process to discover what specific topics deserve more discussion is an extremely promising situation to improve the effectiveness of course discussions. The voting process is extremely efficient at determining what deserves further discussion because of differences of viewpoint or uncertainties of relevant information. Even in online discussions a great deal of discussion might be on the topics that don’t need it, and this may result in not focusing on what should be discussed. Since most Delphis are designed to encourage experts to share viewpoints, they are learning experiences for experts. The same property makes them a learning tool for students.

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