Collaborative Learning

Professors and students learn together in the lab, at the fire station, behind a camera. A look at six projects that combine faculty and student learning in creative and challenging ways

Collaborative learning and co-author students in online higher education: a-REAeduca – collaborative learning and co-authors

The technologies themselves cannot be analyzed as instruments per se, nor can they be exhausted in their relation with science. There is a social and even an individual dimension that affects our own way of relating to society. It is in open education that we have been developing our educational practices. This chapter presents a collaborative learning activity, the curricular unit Materiais e Recursos para eLearning, part of an on-line Master in Pedagogy of eLearning, Universidade Aberta, Portugal. In the present work, the authors dedicate their attention to co-learning and co-research, as processes that help to exemplify some situations, the a-REAeduca. The data collection was supported essentially by the content analysis technique.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The validity of collaborative assessment for learning

This article explores the features relating to the validity of assessment for learning, in particular the features of a collaborative assessment for learning, because of the learning benefits associated with collaborative learning. The article indicates what some of the learning benefits of highly valid collaborative assessment for learning might be, assuming that a valid assessment for learning actually promotes learning. It explores the idea that, for an assessment for learning to be valid, its learning outcomes must be socially appropriate for learners of the twenty-first century. The article illustrates some of these conceptual points, using descriptions of three collaborative assessments for learning currently being practised. Two of the illustrations are taken from the UK and one from the Eastern Caribbean

Collaborative Leadership Learning; Developing Facilitation Skills for Collaborative Learning in Leadership Learning Groups.

many organisations working for example, with less hierarchical structures, with cross- organisational partners, or in professional environments. Leadership at all levels must be supported by leaders in top executive positions who develop their own capabilities both as leaders and in their role of leading the learning of leadership throughout their organisations. Their ideas of their role in leading learning will be shaped by their own leadership development experiences. Collaborative learning for leadership may be a model of learning that reflects the new leadership required; it may enable leaders to develop their own leadership capability in such a way that they feel enabled to work with others on their leadership development

Collaborative learning: a connected community approach

Collaborative Learning in group settings currently occurs across a substantial portion of the UK Higher Education curriculum. This style of learning has many roots including: Enterprise in Higher Education, Action Learning and Action Research, Problem Based Learning, and Practice Based Learning. As such our focus on Collaborative Learning development can be viewed as an evolutionary. This collaborative and active group learning provides the foundation for what can be collectively called connectivist ‘Learning Communities’. In this setting a primary feature of a ‘Learning Community’ is one that carries a responsibility to promote one another’s learning. This paper will outline a developmental collaborative learning approach and describe a supporting software environment, known as the Salford Personal Development Environment (SPDE), that has been developed and implemented to assist in delivering collaborative learning for post graduate and other provision. This is done against a background of much research evidence that group based activity can enhance learning. These findings cover many approaches to group based learning and over a significant period of time. This paper reports on work-in-progress and the features of the environment that are designed to help promote individual and group or community learning that have been influenced by the broad base of research findings in this area

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future

Assessing Online Collaborative Discourse

This qualitative study using transcript analysis was undertaken to clarify the value of Harasim’s Online Collaborative Learning Theory as a way to assess the collaborative process within nursing education. The theory incorporated three phases: (1) idea generating; (2) idea organizing; and (3) intellectual convergence. The transcripts of asynchronous discussions from a two-week module about disaster nursing using a virtual community were analyzed and formed the data for this study. This study supports the use of Online Collaborative Learning Theory as a framework for assessing online collaborative discourse. Individual or group outcomes were required for the students to move through all three phases of the theory. The phases of the Online Collaborative Learning Theory could be used to evaluate the student’s ability to collaborate. It is recommended that group process skills, which have more to do with interpersonal skills, be evaluated separately from collaborative learning, which has more to do with cognitive skills. Both are required for practicing nurses. When evaluated separately, the student learning needs are more clearly delineated

Support of the collaborative inquiry learning process: influence of support on task and team regulation

Regulation of the learning process is an important condition for efficient and effective learning. In collaborative learning, students have to regulate their collaborative activities (team regulation) next to the regulation of their own learning process focused on the task at hand (task regulation). In this study, we investigate how support of collaborative inquiry learning can influence the use of regulative activities of students. Furthermore, we explore the possible relations between task regulation, team regulation and learning results. This study involves tenth-grade students who worked in pairs in a collaborative inquiry learning environment that was based on a computer simulation, Collisions, developed in the program SimQuest. Students of the same team worked on two different computers and communicated through chat. Chat logs of students from three different conditions are compared. Students in the first condition did not receive any support at all (Control condition). In the second condition, students received an instruction in effective communication, the RIDE rules (RIDE condition). In the third condition, students were, in addition to receiving the RIDE rules instruction, supported by the Collaborative Hypothesis Tool (CHT), which helped the students with formulating hypotheses together (CHT condition). The results show that students overall used more team regulation than task regulation. In the RIDE condition and the CHT condition, students regulated their team activities most often. Moreover, in the CHT condition the regulation of team activities was positively related to the learning results. We can conclude that different measures of support can enhance the use of team regulative activities, which in turn can lead to better learning results