28.6: A Broader View - Educational Collaboration in Context

Many of the various problems and issues that arise in collaborative models of learning and teaching have comparatively straightforward solutions, such as modifying tool choices and experimenting with ways of forming groups. In the background, however, always lurk more general issues concerned with educational models and enculturation to more collaborative modes of learning. We address such issues briefly in this section.

Stakeholders and Commitments

Administrators’, educators’, and learners’ stakes in, and commitments to, distance education and collaborative learning are critical. Not long ago, a large proportion of administrators may have had little or no experience with, or knowledge of, learning or teaching online; and thus they may have failed to grasp the importance of logistical and technical support both for educators and learners. Administrators may still overestimate the number of students who can comfortably be accommodated in courses, and may grossly underestimate demands on libraries and technical support (Johnson, 2003, para. 2).

Educators, in turn, may underestimate necessary investments, and may jump into technology-based teaching “without fully realizing the high degree of individual student involvement that will be required, or the radical shift in the role of the faculty”, perhaps because many of their peers “have already made that leap of faith into a new modality, and are approaching it with vigor and enthusiasm” (Johnson, 2003, para. 3). Developing close relationships with technical support personnel (Noakes, 2003) suits only those whose institutions have such personnel. Thus, educators contemplating adoption or adaptation of technology to foster learner collaboration should not only scan their institutional environments for available support or relief mechanisms (Bates, 2000, Ch. 2: Leadership, Vision, and Planning), but also realistically assess the time commitments that both they and learners are willing to make.

Time commitments and constraints are of critical importance to online learners in particular, for, as Johnson reminds us, “Learners usually come to online courses due to limits in time or geography, not necessarily because they want to be heard as individuals or work in teams” (2003, para. 4). Likewise, Guribye, Andreassen, and Wasson point out that “Collaborative learning can impose a severe workload on the collaborating actors” (2003, p. 385). In response, Vanides argues that, though “popular expectations about elearning” may be problematic, particularly with respect to ease and convenience, “deep learning takes deep commitment” from both educators and learners. So he recommends not making group assignments without the will to “invest the effort to make it work … [by] setting clear expectations, rules of engagement, spending time facilitating and helping students with social negotiation, and rewarding teamwork” (Vanides, 2003).

Enculturation

When we use technology to develop learning environments, we “code in our cultural biases, our beliefs, and values” (White, 2006, para. 3). So we need to consider not only whether the institutional and organizational cultures in which we work reflect practices and values of collaboration, but also whether our own habits of collaboration are reflected in the collaborative environments that we are striving to create and in the collaborative processes that we aim to foster and facilitate. As Daradoumis and Xhafa put it: “A culture of collaboration must be based on relationships characterized by trust, motivation, encouragement, mutual support, and openness” (2005, p. 223).

Peer-facilitated enculturation (Olt, Gack, & Cole, 1993), in discussion-based communities for example, may derive from legitimate peripheral participation, or social apprenticeship in collaborative learning communities where contributing, writing, responding, and reflecting are behaviours that accommodating peers scaffold (step-by-step, tier-by-tier), in order to give other learners, and to encourage co-readership and peer responses by not making exceedingly lengthy or multifaceted contributions (Bender, 2003, p. 9). Nevertheless, Bender recognizes the difficulty of instructors providing necessary scaffolding for entire classes, “not only because of class size, but because of the diversity of students” (p. 9). So, in learning communities where diversity is taken as a virtue, it may be necessary for the learners themselves to push the envelope of sociality in order to make their online learning environments more personable and conducive to sustainable and satisfying collaborative learning experiences.

However, how likely is it that run-of-the-mill learners are capable of, or willing to, nurture their peers, if their instructors and communities fail to manifest nurturing and apprenticeship practices at large? Online educators can assess their own tendencies to nurture learners, but perhaps creating a culture of collaboration requires broader, deeper, and longer-term commitments than many educators and learners are willing to make. As we mentioned earlier in discussion in this chapter of assessment schemes for adult learners, in learning contexts that are notably competitive, or where any culture of collaboration runs too shallow to fathom, perhaps offering incentives to induce cooperative learner behaviours would be a small step forward.

It may be necessary to start with teacher training and the ways in which teachers interact with each other in their professional lives, because, as Murphey and Asaoka (2005) argue, fractal models of teacher collaboration predispose student collaboration. That is, if educators collaborate and reflect with one another, as well as with the learners that they profess to educate, the learners themselves stand to benefit from both role models and apprenticeship.

Furthermore, if the notion of collaboration seems intriguing, then offering incentives as part of the process by incorporating it into grading and marking is something to try. The recent trend of reality-competition television shows such as Top Chef and Top Design often have the competitors work in teams, with one person from the losing team subject to elimination. While this is too Darwinian for our own classrooms, it is a useful exercise to have students realize that their learning does not take place in a vacuum but depends on the contributions of other peers.

Pratt and Collins offer an inventory of educator perspectives, one of which, apprenticeship, seems perfectly harmonious with efforts to enculturate students to collaborative endeavours: “Effective teaching is a process of enculturating students into a set of social norms and ways of working” (Pratt and Collins, n.d.). The increasing prominence of collaborative endeavours in professional training and development contexts may do much to bring us nearer to the bright future for education that we envisage.

The Future of Collaborative Learning

We have little doubt that developments in technologies and in both our understandings of, and practical measures for, building online communities will figure prominently in collaborative learning futures. Cameron and Anderson (2006), for example, present a suite of preparatory activities for distance learners to familiarize them with technology—social software in particular— and to introduce them to a distributed learner community. Learners’ deliberate, preliminary accomplishment of many of those technological tasks may satisfy Roberts’ (2005a) call for preparatory work to make sure that students are already computer-savvy collaborators before they begin collaborative online coursework. Visionary arguments suggest that innovation in collective learning calls for diverse communities comprising members with ranges of expertise, congruent goals, meta-cognitive (learning to learn) foci, and various means of communication to satisfy their own needs. Moreover, visionaries suggest that participation in diverse, distributed learning communities will “infuse education throughout students’ lives, orchestrating the contributions of many knowledge sources embedded in real-world settings outside of schooling” (Dede, 2005, Neomillennial Learning Styles Based on Mediated Immersion).

For the future of collaboration, Dede hopes that current means of collaboration that are “dependent on shared physical presence or cumbersome virtual mechanisms” will be replaced with elegant and possibly more economical solutions in which “middleware, interoperability, open content, and open source enable seamless information sharing, collaborative virtual manipulation of tools and media, shared authoring and design, [and] collective critiquing” (Dede, 2005, Implications for Higher Education’s Strategic Investments).

So perhaps whatever decisions we make as educators with regard to collaboration should be as remote as possible from tool dependent and as comprehensive as possible of what is both available and of value to learners over ever-broadening and diversifying educational networks. Chapter 26, Techno Expression, comprises broad visions of such networked learning.