Collaborative Learning

Collaborative learning refers to methodologies and environments in which learners engage in a common task where each individual depends on and is accountable to each other. This learning project provides resources and best practices for learning about and designing effective collaborative learning activities.

Learning Tasks

• Compare learning alone in a quiet room focused on a specific learning topic with collaborative learning in a group, where learners/students interact with eachother and solve a problem jointly.
  • What are benefits and drawbacks of both scenarios?
  • How would you mix those learning scenarios?
  • When you prefer learning alone and when would you prefer learning collaboratively? Explain to the other students why you prefer which scenario. What can be the implications of the teacher knowing those preferences of the students?
  • Can you identify learning topics that might be better addressed in collaborative setting? (e.g. due to complexity of topic, requirements of different expertise, ...) provide example for the topics.
  • Compare Collaborative Learning with other collaborative approaches like Collaborative Mapping. What are similarities and differences?
• Look at grand challenges like climate change or COVID-19. Are these topics appropriate for collaborative learning even if there are no easy answers for these global challenges? The teacher will not and cannot expect from the students to solve such kind of a problem. How would you as teacher introduce the learning task and how would you describe the expected outcome for the students? (e.g. improve Risk Literacy, ...)

Resources

• Benefits
• Best Practices
• Examples
• Learning Modes
• Rubrics
• Stages of Group Development
• Team Evaluation Form
• Team Formation

See Also

• Contextual Learning
• Instructional design
• Teaching and Learning Online
• Wikipedia: Collaborative learning
• Collaboratively Building Concepts
• Collaborative Mapping
• Facilitating Online
• Wikipedia: Computer-supported collaborative learning

External Links

• The Web 2.0 and Participatory e-Learning - course by Curtis Bonk
• Wikis as Tools for Collaborative Learning and Knowledge Management - a course by Bernie Dodge.
• Teaching and learning online with wikis by Naomi Augar, Ruth Raitman and Wanlei Zhou
• Wikis in teaching and assessment: the M/Cyclopedia project by Axel Bruns and Sal Humphreys
• Open Study - See introduction at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

References

Completion status: this resource is considered to be complete.