Students learn more successfully when they’re active participants and they learn even better when they interact with other students, whether receiving instruction online or in a face-to-face setting.
The interaction also offers the benefit of fostering social presence, having contact with actual people. Social presence has also been shown to impact student motivation and participation, actual and perceived learning, course and instructor satisfaction and retention in online courses, according to a recent report by Computers in Human Behavior.
Collaborative learning can not only help students develop higher-level thinking, but boost their confidence and self-esteem. Yet because the pandemic is keeping students and teachers separated and working remotely, a truly collaborative teaching and learning experience might seem elusive.
The good news is that it’s not. A recent report from Information and Learning Sciences on interaction in online distance education that advocates implementing collaborative learning activities in distance education courses offers some ideas for university professors to integrate collaborative learning and collaboration support into their online instructional design. Assigning learners to a group won’t automatically lead to productive interaction, according to the report. Instead, professors can use designated instructional design to develop tasks that require learners to interact and construct knowledge together.
Here are four steps for designing instruction that facilitates online collaborative learning.
- Set learning goals. When designing a collaborative learning activity, professors must first determine the lesson goals. For example, the goal might simply be to learn about a particular topic or acquire collaboration skills. Then, professors can consider the steps necessary to achieve the goal. For example, instructors can use reciprocal learning, asking students to explain a concept to their partners.
- Find the right level of task complexity and create positive interdependence. Collaborative tasks should be sufficiently complex and require students to co-construct knowledge to solve the problems. Professors need to design tasks that require student interaction. Simply asking students to just solve the task as a group can lead to individuals taking on subtasks instead of working together. The idea is to design collaborative activities that naturally require interaction between learners like dividing task materials from different fields between members of a group to they have to pool the information, discuss alternative solutions and come to a joint decision. Using this design fosters a positive interdependence between learners, creating individual responsibility – all essential for effective collaborative learning.
- Strategically form groups of students. Professors must create the right student groups to improve the likelihood of collaborative success. When dividing a class for collaborative activities, consider how the characteristics of group members might affect both the interaction and results. Heterogenous groups in which students each have different backgrounds and skillsets can be helpful in learning, but assigning students in homogenous groups – like grouping less-active students together, for instance – can help boost participation. The sweet spot for group size is four students. Larger groups can reduce the visibility and participation of individual group members.
- Use technologies that specifically support collaboration. There are plenty of technologies that can foster group involvement both online and in the college classroom. Technologies that afford learner opportunities to engage in a joint task, communicate, share resources, engage in productive collaborative learning processes, engage in co-construction, monitor and regulate collaborative learning and find and build groups and communities.
Groups can also require additional support to foster the collaborative relationships and activities. Once professors have designed and are implementing the collaborative tasks, they need to support students in monitoring and promoting productive interactions. Group awareness tools can help facilitate monitoring and regulating collaborative activity with visual feedback. Collaboration scripts guide learners in engaging in productive interaction.