ONLINE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
IN HIGHER EDUCATION
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ONLINE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
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This site is no longer being funded by CQU. If you work for, or know of, an educational institution that might be interested in funding this site, please email me for further details. Guest EditorialThis is a page wherein researchers and practitioners active in the area of online collaborative learning are invited to draw attention to any aspect of the field that takes their fancy - perhaps thoughts about a recent conference, or about some research that needs to be carried out, or some misgivings about current practice, or whatever. Pieces may be light-hearted or serious, and of almost any length and format. If you are currently active in the area of online collaborative learning, either as researcher or practitioner, and would like to contribute a guest editorial for publication here, please email details.
Editorial #6 A simple model for getting started with e-learning Senior Lecturer Lifelong Education and International Development [LEID] Institute of Education, Room 707, 20 Bedford Way University of London London WC1H 0AL By way of validating my suggestions - I have learned and taught online ever since the internet became available for this purpose back in about 1988. In 1992 I started the existing training course: http://www.ioe.ac.uk/english/OET.htm , and between January 1994 and March 1997 I ran 8 different cohorts of an online master’s course for English teachers. Together, the two courses total nearly 2000 teachers and other education staff at all levels from school through to higher education. I have always believed that what teachers commonly do in the classroom can be effectively “translated” to the online world. This does not mean that what they do is always the best, but – since there is no such thing as a general kind of best practice/one size fits all – it makes more sense to build on centuries of teaching experience than to urge that teachers should plunge in and try to use the internet for radical changes in their methods of teaching. So I suggest that anyone starting out should take actual classroom teaching as the stepping off point, and try to replicate that. [I like to call this the replication model, seeing it as one of many.] In the process what can/cannot be easily replicated will become apparent. That will lead to thinking about what is important and what isn’t, which technologies or media can do what, and so on. Some of the key factors in classroom teaching and what technology can do are listed here:
Success in an online course has always depended critically on the effective structuring of the collaborative learning communities, and this will continue to be the case in a high-tech environment. It is far from enough merely to set questions for discussion, since people need indicators of how they should respond to each other, what roles they might take, how much and how often they should contribute, what language style is appropriate, and so on. They also need guidance on how to use good threading techniques, especially relevant subject headers.
This model stands in strong contrast to others that assume learners will read text on webpages, engage in computer marked formative assessments, find their own routes through learning materials, occasionally contact a tutor, and optionally participate in open discussion forums with some fellow-students. In other words, it still accepts the central role of the teacher. Of course it is to be expected that many educators wish to reject what they see as an old-fashioned, not very effective, "transmission" model of education. They would prefer a model in which learners are more actively involved and more independently responsible for their own learning processes. I believe such goals can be achieved within the model I have outlined. In my experience, when they are not achieved, this is because the model is inadequately applied. I find in my training course and in various projects, that people very quickly come to grips with what I see as the elements of teaching, and this enables them to apply the replication model to their online course design. These elements, which can be called the 3Ps, are:
In a traditional view of teaching, the 3 elements are used in the chronological default order shown here. But the elements are infinitely varied by teachers in real classrooms across the world every day [mostly unaware of what they’re doing]. It’s just as possible to vary them in the virtual world too. The importance of understanding a model like this one is that you can think in a more productive way about what you are doing/want to do/have done. Fuller details of how to do so are on my personal Web page.
Editorial #5
So Where Are The Books? Senior Lecturer Faculty of Business and Informatics, Central Queensland University, Bundaberg, Queensland 4670, Australia Browsing amazon.com recently, and searching for books on "collaborative learning", I turned up a list of 759 books! On first appearances, a definite over-supply. Unfortunately, however, the great majority are out of print, or more than five years old, or attuned to the K-12 arena. Of the rest, most are focused on face-to-face collaborative learning, or are highly expensive conference proceedings, or are so poorly rated by reviewers as to be viewed with great suspicion. So what are we left with? Well, apart from Online Collaborative Learning: Theory and Practice, ed T S Roberts, to which I have an obvious interest, the best are probably Creativity and Collaborative Learning: The Practical Guide to Empowering Students and Teachers by Jacqueline S. Thousand (Editor), Ann Nevin (Editor), Richard A. Villa (Editor), which has some good advice for practitioners; Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches by Pierre Dillenbourg (Editor), which takes in a range of viewpoints from researchers from a wide variety of disciplines Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom Palloff, R. M. & Pratt, K., which provides proven strategies for taking learning beyond the classroom and into the online environment, and Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge by Kenneth A. Bruffee, which is likely to appeal especially to those keen on a non-foundationalist perspective. Less than half a dozen in the last five years! There must be more out
there - where are they? I'd be interested in any recommendations as to
recently published books worth reading, particularly those likely to be of
benefit to practicing teachers. Please email me and let me know! Editorial #4 Figure and ground Associate Professor, Center for Distance Education, Athabasca University, Canada. Dillenbourg and Schneider have taken a good swing at those e-learning providers – be they designers, administrators, teachers – who would work diligently at the chore of recreating the comfort and ambience of traditional classroom environments in virtual mediums. Those who “design-by-imitation” are often those behind the battle cries: “Get wired!” “Get digital!” “Get e-literate!” And, in so doing, the decks are cleared for a multi-disciplinary race that, at worst, merely enhances, and, at best … recreates? Re-paradigms? Rebuilds the wheels of learning? One of the most potentially interesting and useful outcomes of critically examining our teaching-learning experiences is the resultant analysis of assumptions about “traditional” learning practices. How is it, for example, that a group of learners processes and understands its group dynamics function? What did learners and instructors use as tools – for cognition, for reflection, for evaluation – before it became possible to access the archived records of asynchronous text-based courses? My suggestion is that we have always had the tools. And although we now have the advantage of having differently effective tools, the real value of the differences that should be celebrated in the rush to e-learning transcends functionality and measurement. While our tools may be still analogous to the figure, the ground around them has shifted. Similar to Toffler’s “prosumers,” e-learners have stepped out of the paradigms that have previously defined them. Their new territory both encompasses and yields synergies that are created by the continuous negotiation of their sense of social presence and its companion learning dynamic, community. The bold new frontier of e-learning rests on these concepts; understanding them has the potential to lead to the transformative use, not just the re-tooled use, of learning processes.
Editorial #3 Report on the Networked Learning 2002 Conference at the University of Sheffield 26-28 March 2002 E-Learning Associate, School of Education, University of Sheffield.
Speaking as one of the organisers of this Conference, I believe that we can say with confidence that it went well both organisationally and academically - and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. We were helped by the high quality and enthusiastic contributions of all participants, but also by the Celtic dancing at the Conference dinner and sunny weather!
The aim of the Conference was to highlight good practice in networked e-learning research-based practice in Higher Education and Lifelong Learning. The majority of delegates were practitioners in universities and colleges in the UK and 14 other countries, including strong representation from Australia, New Zealand, Europe and South Africa. We received a large number of high quality proposals and over 90 of these were published in the Conference Proceedings. The Symposia format for the Conference was particularly successful. This is where research papers were organised into groupings of 3-6 with an over-arching theme such as The UK E-University, Networked Learning Policy, Theoretical Understandings of Networked learning, Knowledge Construction and On-line Environments, Ideas of Community and E-Learning Groups and Communities of Practice.
The Networked Learning Conference Proceedings present research papers on the latest cutting-edge applications and critical analysis of e-learning in post compulsory education and training, and represents an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in this vital field.
Our main impression from the Conference is that e-learning has now become much more 'mainstream' than it was two years ago, and is quickly becoming integrated into educational processes. Practitioners and researchers alike need to understand the vast array of issues that we face in making e-learning a viable, practical and quality educational endeavour and the Conference Proceedings will help develop understanding. The Conference Proceedings have been edited by Sheena Banks, David McConnell (University of Sheffield) and Peter Goodyear, Vivien Hodgson (University of Lancaster).
The Conference Proceedings
cost 30 pounds Sterling + 5.00 GBP for UK postage and 10.00 GBP postage for
overseas. You can order a copy by
e-mailing the Networked Learning Conference at nlc@lancaster.ac.uk.
Alternatively we are
planning to put all the papers onto the Conference Web site in the next few
weeks which is
You can also read details of the Networked Learning Manifesto funded by the ESRC Research Programme which was launched at the Conference. This is at http://csalt.lancs.ac.uk/esrc/.
The next Networked Learning Conference will again be jointly organised by the Universities of Sheffield and Lancaster and will take place at the University of Lancaster 5-7 April 2004. Please e-mail us at nlc@lancaster.ac.uk if you wish to get further information.
Editorial #2 A call to break away from imitating schooling. Director Senior Lecturer TECFA, School of Psychology and Education, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Today, e-learning designers often reproduce classroom activities. Virtual campuses mimic real campuses with video-based lectures, lecture notes, assignments (quiz or essay writing), … The very language of most platforms (courses, lessons, …) is inherited from schools. It is a common place to observe that, although the design of planes is somewhat inspired by the morphology of birds, planes do not flip their wings!
e-Learning is now in a stage of design-by-imitation. More precisely, we imitate planes: what we reproduce is not learning as it naturally occurs but the way learning had been turned into institutional practices. Why should an environment for learners in the workplace look like a school lecture?
Let's move to a second generation e-Learning that takes it inspiration outside classrooms and foster on the affordances of new media rather than on reproducing the past. The general assumption that underlies e-Learning research is that the more a system is able to reproduce features face-to-face learning activities, the better it would be! As an example, according to this postulate, a video-based interaction would intrinsically be better than a text-based interaction because it includes face-to-face features such as facial expressions or body language. We question this postulate. The promising work in e-Learning investigates functionalities that do not exist in face-to-face interactions, for instance the possibility for the learners to analyze the trace of their own interactions or to see a display of their group dynamics. A group of learners and their e-Learning tools constitute a distributed system which self-organizes in a different way than a group of learners face to face.
Editorial #1 Senior Lecturer Faculty of Business and Informatics, Central Queensland University, Bundaberg, Queensland 4670, Australia I thought I’d use the first editorial to give a couple of impressions culled from the last day of the recent CSCL conference in Boulder (or, more precisely, in Interlocken, half way between Boulder and Denver). The whole event was very enjoyable and well-organised, and I was pleased to be able to mingle with so many eminent researchers and practitioners in the field. The first is the feeling expressed several times at the conference that a gap exists between the researchers and those closer to the coalface. Well, surprise surprise! I had been fortunate enough to attend the ICIS (Information Systems) conference the month before, and exactly the same sentiments were expressed there, but with a far greater degree of angst. I suspect this gap is perceived to exist in almost all fields – it’s probably inevitable, and may even be for the best. The second is the emphasis during the conference on synchronous, rather than asynchronous, learning. Perhaps this is to be expected, given the assumption of many delegates of a K-12 environment. My own interest is in higher education, and I perceive the future to be largely based on asynchronous communication (since students often have to communicate across different geographical regions, often with different time-zones, and in any case having different life-commitments). So hopefully the next conference in Norway might redress the balance a little. Finally, I was impressed by the level of funding that appears to be available to researchers in the US, which is greater than that available in Australia, and perhaps in most other countries, by at least a couple of orders of magnitude. A case for more international links, maybe? |
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