After many discussions about learning in communities and networked collaborative learning I have tried to relate to my own experiences. I have spent many years in school, but most of the time by learning without any online resources. (During my first years in school the multimedia use was only series of reversal film slides together with a sound recording or maybe a short 16 mm film.) So therefore my considerations had focused on collaboratively learning in an offline setting and how it is possible to transfer it to an online setting.
My most collaboratively learning experiences must be my last year in secondary school when I were part of a class with 23 students where most of us already had studied together in the class the two years before too. Some of the students aimed for very high grades, other students for high grades and some students (probably) for ok grades. However, our final average grades in the class must be seen as really high for a class average. One of the reasons to the high average grades was probably that we spent about 7 hours a day, 5 days a week together with studying, discussing the topics we studied and also had fun. The highly motivated students in the class went “all in” with the courses and showed the other students that is was possible to learn really much and succeed in the courses. Their enthusiasm also influenced the others in the class. Or discussions of the content in the courses also made it easy and relaxed to ask the other students about what you currently did not understand in a course and therefore was stuck on and get answers to be able to continue to learn the remaining material in the course.
Unfortunately, it is quite tricky to transfer the settings described above into an online setting. However, parts of the elements might be possible to transfer. Jin [1] describes a method with “Awareness information” where each student’s activity is made visible to the other students using visualizations. The awareness information consists of both group awareness, which focus on the group learners’ activities, knowledge level and the functioning of the group, and objective self-awareness, which focus on each learner’s performance and might compare the individual performance with other learners’ performance. This is probably a method to spread the enthusiasm to also the students that were not that enthusiastic from start. Another method is described by van Oostveen et al. [2] where a program is provided with technology enhanced problem based learning pedagogy. One of the results is that the course participants “grew together”. This is probably a good way of enthuse questions and answers between the students. It is probable possible to build strong collaborative learning communities also online, but it is probably not easier than offline.
- Jin, S. H. (2017). Using visualization to motivate student participation in collaborative online learning environments. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 20(2), 51-62.
- van Oostveen, R., Childs, E., Clarkson, J., & Flynn, K. (2016). Becoming Close with Others Online: Distributed Community Building in Online PBL Courses. College Quarterly, 19(1), n1.