28.4: Benefits of Collaboration

“Among the most highly regarded of these skills can be counted the ability to work productively in teams, in both social and work settings, especially in situations where the various team members may have diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions. Indeed, it is in just such an environment that collaborative work can bring the greatest benefits.” (Roberts, 2005a, p. vi)

Collaboration sounds like a very desirable thing, but for educators to change what they do, we need to spell out the potential gains. Benefits of collaboration that scholars often mention include: amplification of learners’ intellectual capacity; meta-cognitive skills, that is, powers of thinking about thinking, including planning and evaluation of learning processes; plus social and job skills. We also imagine that as collaboration is made more integral to the process of education, we will see it used effectively in other domains. There is nothing that prevents these other areas from embracing collaboration and leapfrogging ahead of education, so we feel that many of these basic notions can be effectively employed in any online environment, whether educational, professional, or vocational.

According to Graham and Misanchuk (2004), theoretical benefits of learning through social interaction, or collaboration, derive from synergy within groups enhancing members’ thinking and organizational skills, promoting insights and explanations, and encouraging greater achievement. Similar benefits deriving from cooperation entail risk-taking and perseverance, retention of what is learned, meta-cognitive skill development, creativity, and transferability.

Roberts argues that learners stand to benefit as much from “collaborative learning within a computer-supported environment … as within a classroom or lecture hall … [because] fruitful and constructive discussion and dialogue can take place at any time” (Roberts, 2005b, p. 4). Likewise, Klemm concludes that face-to-face collaboration techniques transferred online can lead to “better student learning and achievement” (2005, p. 198).

Whether in the classroom or outside, exploiting links to prior knowledge can enhance the entire learning process and lead to the development of interpersonal intelligence in critical thinking communities. Chamot suggests that interactive teaching can raise learners’ awareness of their prior knowledge and enable them to develop new knowledge that is “shared and constructed rather than transmitted one way from teacher to students”. Collaborative teaching allows students and teachers to work together to “discover, create and expand their understanding and skills”. The aim of such collaboration is to develop interpersonal intelligence, or “the ability to understand and respond effectively to others” (Chamot, 1995, p. 4).

In multi-cultural settings, this kind of interpersonal intelligence would encompass intercultural understanding and communication, with classrooms, virtual learning environments, and online work environments created for a specific purpose serving as exemplars of communities. Through discussion and analysis of participants’ thinking, leaders can raise meta-cognitive awareness, enabling them to choose appropriate strategies to enhance the efficiency of their learning. Taylor suggests that benefits also include “building self-esteem, reducing anxiety, encouraging understanding of diversity, fostering relationships, stimulating critical thinking, and developing skills needed in the workforce” (2005, p. 24).

Conditions for Educational Collaboration

While we focus on educational collaboration here, education is not restricted to the academy but is applicable to any situation where it is desirable for participants to improve in order to help a community grow. Thus, Haavind’s four key elements for online collaboration can be thought of as basic:

1. Socially bonded communities of learners
2. Collaborative activity designs
3. Explicit scaffolding or teaching of how to collaborate
4. Evaluation of collaborative participation (Haavind, 2006)

To engender collaboration for purposes of making or improving something, from an educator’s perspective, Currie suggests focusing on several key factors: intent to collaborate, characteristics of target populations, types of member interactions, time frames, and the existence or necessity of guidelines, rules, and governance (personal correspondence, March 10, 2006). This is very much in line with Dillenbourg’s (2002) analyses of computer-supported collaborative learning scripts in terms of:

1. what tasks learners must complete,
2. how groups form,
3. how groups distribute responsibilities,
4. how learners (and groups) interact, and
5. when task work and interactions occur.

Raising what by now should be a familiar challenge to promises of online, anytime, anywhere, learning, Dillenbourg underscores the necessity and expense of tutelage:

“Regulating collaborative learning is a subtle art. The tutor has to provide prompts or cues without interfering with the social dynamics of the group. Light human tutoring is a necessary, but expensive resource for computer-supported collaborative learning.” (Dillenbourg, 2002, p. 2)

Chamot (1995) emphasizes the importance of a strong teacher presence, and this may be even more important with non-traditional students and in English as a Second (ESL) or Foreign (EFL) Language settings. Sorenson suggests that collaborative learning calls not for “decomposition of the learning content or tasks”, but rather for “supporting learners’ navigation through meta-communicative levels” (2004, p. 257). Thus collaboration should involve more than talking the talk of collaboration; it should entail talking the walk, that is, communicating about the hows and the whys of both processes and products of collaboration.

Interdependence, by definition, characterizes collaboration, but entails challenges and risks as well. Graham and Misanchuk (2004) explain: “The higher the level of interdependence between group members, the greater the communication overhead [time] required to complete the learning task.” They also suggest “individual learning can be compromised if there is limited interdependence in a learning group”. Although mature groups that they studied could ascertain “the level of interdependence with which … [the groups themselves] were comfortable”, Graham and Misanchuk highlight cases in which “groups chose an efficiency focus over a learning focus” (pp. 193–194). In other words, those groups’ interactions were more business-like than educational, and arguably more cooperative than collaborative.

It is worth noting here that none of those definitions, conditions, or strategies for fostering collaboration focuses on technology per se. Subsequent sections point to possible additional benefits of using certain computerbased environments (for example, see Chapter 25, Tools for Online Engagement and Communication, on blogs and wikis), but such environments also have their own demands. Their very novelty means that we have yet to fully understand their true nature, and, as Sorenson (2004) suggests, this may mean that we have yet to reap their benefits to the full.