28.8: Learners’ Stories of Online Collaboration

In this section are three stories from learners about online collaboration in university undergraduate and postgraduate courses. All three stories derive from a SCoPE seminar on collaboration (Beaufait, 2006). Narrators retell their stories for this collection and post-hoc respondents reflect on each.

These three stories bridge a millennium, span a decade of online education, and perhaps show it at or near its best. Sylvia’s story is a recollection of project-based learning over 10 years ago in an undergraduate course at university. Beyond the Mines of Bhoria is a recollection of a post-graduate certificate course about three years ago. Bonnie’s story relates experience in problem-solving and project-based learning during an online graduate course in 2005.

Sylvia's Story

One of my first online courses was also my first exposure to successful learner collaboration in a university-level course. The instructor used a “jigsaw” model to organize a research and learning management software design project as follows:

• Phase I (4 weeks) was a general orientation to issues and an introduction to the software product we would be evaluating.
• Phase II (5 weeks) involved group investigation into the design of technology.
• Phase III (4 weeks) involved a team design project incorporating the interdisciplinary perspectives researched during Phase II.

During Phase 1 we engaged in a debate activity that gave us an opportunity to become familiar with the beta software, and also to sink our teeth into some design issues. For Phase II we randomly formed five groups, each with the responsibility of researching and developing expertise in one of the assigned design perspectives and to prepare a summary of findings.

1. Human-computer interactions design
2. Educational software design
3. Group communication and computer conferencing design
4. Collaboration and group-ware design
5. Hypermedia systems and tools design

With such a short time frame to complete this phase, it was essential that the instructor scaffold our work by providing the main topic areas, a selection of core readings, and a recommended format for organizing the report and presenting our work at the end of Phase II.

We were then divided randomly into five new groups using the Jigsaw model. Each new design group consisted of an “expert” from each of the former research groups. Using this model, each learner had something unique to contribute to the group based on their earlier research. The final outcome was a group design plan for refining the learning management system software we were using in the course.

We came back together as a whole class to share and discuss our final design projects with developers from the software company. Functioning as software design teams, we were required to creatively and succinctly articulate our designs and theoretical support for our decisions and defend our work through open questioning by other class members and visitors.

One aspect that made this a powerful, collaborative learning experience was the situated course design. We were assessing the effectiveness of the learning management software as a communication medium for accomplishing our own collaborative work. In addition to drawing on individual areas of design expertise, we reflected on the experience of using the virtual space to accomplish our design tasks. As such, it was an authentic task of using educational technologies in an educational setting.

Scheduled team meetings with the instructor provided a focal point, requiring us to articulate our progress as a group. The structure of these meetings modelled authentic interdisciplinary design team environments. Also, throughout the project we were encouraged to use the learning management system as much as possible. This served two purposes:

1. We experienced first-hand the affordances and limitations of the communication technology under review, adding to the authentic nature of the task.
2. The process of group work was made explicit to assist class members in reflecting on their educational experiences in using the technology. In other words, we were able to use examples from immediate experiences to illustrate shortcomings of the software under review.

Another essential component was that we were clear of what we were working towards. There was a great deal of flexibility in how we chose to go about our work, but we could appreciate how each phase informed the next. We became aware of our own background knowledge, learning needs, and interests. The sequence of full class to small groups to full class to small groups to full class allowed for sharing, checking of our work and progress, then we went back to the smaller groups to focus on the next phase.

I remember what really struck me at the time was how important the instructor’s role was in guiding the process, how supportive she was, but also how little we saw of her throughout the course! The jigsaw collaborative model was a perfect fit for a research and design project. (Sylvia Currie, personal correspondence, June 21, 2006)

A reflection on Sylvia’s story

Sylvia’s story highlights some important points about the use of technology. First, note Sylvia’s point about the instructor providing a scaffold for student learning, which she suggests is due to the short time frame. However, it is important to underline that the time frame is short not only because of the demands of the class, but because the class was conducted online.

We see the instructor providing focal points in time (“scheduled team meetings”) in order to keep students working towards a goal. It is at this point that we see two potential problems. The first is what happens when an unmotivated student or students participate. The second related point is how we demonstrate that the teacher is active. Sylvia is perceptive enough to recognize the teacher’s participation through the framework that the teacher set up, but other students (and administrators) may not be as perceptive.

Another important point about the use of technology can be seen in Sylvia’s observation that the task the students were set is authentic. In this sense, the technology is not used for recreating the classroom (a common problem with many schemes that are simply content delivery) but for setting up a task that replicates something that might or will be done in the real world.

The final point is that the technology, rather than making each student a clone with similar knowledge and experiences, calls on students to access their individual knowledge and interests and bring these to the table in order to inform other team members. Thus, teachers wanting to use technology successfully probably have to have greater awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of students that they are teaching with technology than without, and this stands the commonly expressed fear of technology replacing people with robots on its head.

Another reflection on Sylvia’s story

Sylvia is very clear on what she got from the course and why, and there is very little that I can add to what she said. I shall just mention the points that remain foremost in my mind as a teacher immediately after reading the story.

The first is the important role of teachers’ judgment on key aspects of course design. In an ideal world, some of us might wish to leave more decisions to the students, such as exactly what groups need to be formed, but the teacher in Sylvia’s story had evidently decided that he or she was fully justified in prescribing certain steps in order to get to the desired endpoint on time.

The second is the nature of the endpoint that was chosen in this case. Having a meeting with representatives of the software company scheduled, knowing that guests would be invited, and therefore knowing that being able to articulate one’s thoughts and design proposals beyond the confines of the class was expected, was clearly a very focusing and motivating factor for students. There are clearly some risks in this strategy, because an unsuccessful group would have been enough to create a somewhat embarrassing situation in front of a wide audience, and, more importantly, it might have been difficult to point to any clear outcomes of the course, since everything was framed in the context of the final goal. This points again to the importance of the teacher’s judgment.

In addition to the teacher’s judgment, another thing that is clearly required of the teacher is skill in guiding the process, as well as considerable time spent planning the course. Sylvia doesn’t make it clear what level of student this course was for, but at least it seems likely that it wasn’t a freshman course. We expect that for a freshman course one would be a little more modest in one’s goals. This would be even more true of pre-tertiary education.

Additional comments from Sylvia

Years later while reflecting on this experience I realize how it influenced my ideas about assessment of learning. There was never an expectation that certain content “be covered” or that all students should be leaving the course with the same new knowledge. The nature of true collaborative work is that there is considerable variability in what is learned. It is important to take advantage of the diversity of [learners’] skills and knowledge and appreciate how each learner contributes to the advancement of the group. Assessment strategies that are based on the assumption that everyone is learning the same thing obviously don’t fit. Also grading practices that look at individual work, rather than group processes and accomplishments are difficult to implement. (Sylvia Currie, personal correspondence, August 18, 2006)

Another Story: Beyond the Mines of Bhoria

It was a constructivist-collaborative course-build. The instructional plan combined three sections of the same course. Students could introduce themselves by producing courseware supported Web pages. There was one big forum for introducing yourself, get-ta-know-ya, hi-how-have-you-been, what’re-ya-up-to messages. Though a peek at an instructor’s view might reveal literally hundreds of unread student messages, they constituted a massive tableau from and through which students could establish identities, draw together, and form obligatory groups for ensuing project work.

Alongside ran a set of course readings, topic-specific discussions, and jigsaw analyses of core concepts. Focused and stimulating discussions with guest contributors prominent in the field rounded out the suite of interactivity.

A course schedule, plus group mates’ diverse experiences, practical needs, and individual interests drove group work on to a plan, a written proposal, and an elaborate framework for a multi-faceted online instructional program. Except to say that our group of four had compatible personalities, despite diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, let me go into no further details on that point here.

As a student, not only did I realize that the course instructors had collaborated on building and updating the course, it also was evident that they collaborated among themselves as well as with students on group formation. Being in one section didn’t restrict student-to-student interactions with those in another. In fact, all my group mates were from other sections, and another instructor supervised and supported us in our group activities.

It was, all in all, a warm, fuzzy, collaborative production zone, until it was time for peer group-work assessment. Final group reviews and tweaking of our jointly planned and substantiated product had gone like clockwork: Incremental file-naming, one-author-at-a-time editing, annotation protocols, change-tracking, precise references, and peer-to-peer suggestions got approved, bettered, and confirmed—pass after pass, following the sun around the globe. One by one, we signed off on what was left, proud to have done the best we could under the circumstances, and went to bed …

The final group assignment was done, and collaboration was over. Our next task was to assess ourselves, and each of our group mates, individually, using an evaluation framework that course developers and instructors had prepared in advance. There was neither negotiation of criteria, nor feedback on results. We submitted individual forms to our individual instructors, and that was supposed to be that. However, one student in our group of four sent complimentary copies to everyone in the group. That assessment closed with an open question: “Why isn’t this assessment collaborative?” but no discussion ensued.

A reflection on Beyond the Mines

This story is a useful counterpoint to other stories of great successes with online project-based work. While this too sounds successful, one is left with a feeling of great possibilities left untouched. Of course, this relates to the last area where teachers retain power, which is in assessment. Teachers, at the end of the day, have to turn in rolls with grades, and doing so is an act of responsibility impinging on our efforts to expand our classroom, even as technology stretches it beyond recognition.

All teachers treasure moments when a student returns to thank a teacher for some lesson that was put to use, and I have often, when doing something that stems from a teacher’s guidance, wondered what he or she would think. As the technology puts students together to teach each other, it suggests that we are going to have to create channels to keep teachers in touch with their students.

Another reflection on Beyond the Mines

Even in a purportedly “radical model” of asynchronous, computer-supported collaborative learning, as we pointed out in the section on Assessment Schemes above, Roberts finds that educators often continue to base course grades on learners’ individual efforts (2005, p. 8). We see such limitations even in Beyond the Mines of Bhoria.

On a brighter note, in a synchronous computer-mediated collaboration (chat) study, yet still in line with Haavind’s (2006) and Roberts’ (2005) calls for evaluation protocols, Paulus suggests that sterling peer evaluations can indicate equality of participation, even though learners’ reflections may reveal more cooperative and less collaborative interaction strategies such as division of labour. For example, follow-up on the small chat group that Paulus studied revealed that learners “chose to cooperate through individual contribution to the task, rather than collaborate through sustained dialogue about the concepts to be learned” (Paulus, 2005, p. 119). I think the Mines story shows what educators can do more to foster and facilitate formative peer evaluations.

Confessions of a former post-graduate mine-worker

It has been years since my first, and hopefully last, adult educational experiences involving largely pre-constructed technological learning environments, built utilizing what instructional designers called modules and shells. On one hand, those learning experiences enabled simultaneous reflection on two leading ed-tech platforms at the time: Blackboard (Bb, hence Bhoria) and WebCT; and rounded out instructional experience using Moodle, an alternative, open-source platform. They also revealed a host of variables in quality of instruction and extent (or limitations) of cooperation and collaboration in online learning environments. On the other, although I continue to adopt and adapt computer-mediated communication strategies whenever they seem conducive to enhancing blended learning opportunities, my stomach still churns in memory of canned instruction often dependent upon educational decisions of remote designers and disengaged instructors. Nevertheless, hope revives as I remember the considerate and engaging peers and educators among whom collaboration was possible despite instructional designs, technological shortcomings, and other staff and student commitments. (anonymous, September 14, 2007)

Bonnie's Story

In an online graduate class in New Media last summer, I was assigned to a group of four, and we were to produce a learning module both discussing a particular issue of New Media as well as a New Media artifact. The instructors of the class grouped us according to our experience, expertise, and interests. We were a mixed group of high school teachers and adult educators with differing technical expertise, from almost zero to highly sophisticated. We also had a very strong personality in the group, someone who could be quite opinionated but also very, very funny.

In my mind thinking about this project, I divide the group’s work over the six weeks into two distinct periods: There were the first two weeks when we discussed at length about the project and how we would work on it, and the last four weeks when we worked on the project itself. The group functioned differently at the two different stages of the task: talking about the work versus working on the work itself.

For the first period we used an asynchronous forum and tried to use a wiki. Because the wiki added another channel of communication, we did not use it so much and focused our discussion in the forum space. However, the discussion dragged on and on. No conclusions or decisions seemed imminent. It seemed we were all reluctant to take charge and make a decision. Perhaps it was because none of us wanted to counter the strong personality, who seemed to have quite strong attachments to certain ideas.

Finally we met in a synchronous chat via WebCT’s integrated chat function and managed to make all the very important decisions quite rapidly. Ironically, the strong personality was very amenable to the ideas of others and very happy to accept other ways of doing things.

Once we began work on the project in the second period, our communication with each other became very frequent and very effective, using both asynchronous and synchronous channels. Once we actually had something tangible to work on and to communicate about, we began to really gel as a group, so much that our synchronous chats often digressed wildly into other topics.

We also had various open forums for discussing different aspects of the project, emailed one another, and used wikis as repositories for ongoing text writing. We were now a multi-channel group and it did not seem onerous because we had so much to discuss. Once we reached the end of the project, I had very good feelings about our group and our project was fabulous.

In retrospect, if we had had defined roles at the beginning (or role interdependence), for example a project manager, a web designer, a subject matter expert, etc., our decision-making at the beginning might have been smoother. I think that we were four very socially and culturally different people and we encountered problems with just ‘discussing with our group’. If that had been the end of the group’s purpose, I think we not would have felt our group had been very successful.

However, once we began work on the project itself, we attained high positive interdependence in terms of goals and sub-tasks because each of us was responsible for a portion that others depended on. Having the tangible product itself seemed to grease the flow of communication. Because we had to create some thing, working on a very real, very tangible artifact facilitated our communication, helped us, and quite frankly, forced us to overcome our difficulties, all without our being conscious of it.

Our goal was completion of the product, not just the communication itself. Because of that I think that the communication issues became just another problem to solve rather than turning into a potential drama. I think that one of the best reasons for product/project-based collaborative learning is that in order to be successful, groups put into practice all the important aspects of cooperation without having to be fully conscious of it, or being didactically taught it. (Bonnie Johnston, personal correspondence, May 26, 2006)

A reflection on Bonnie’s story

Bonnie’s story raises an interesting problem. What if her group had not been able to meet synchronously? Would they have been able to sort out the problems? Or would they have given up and been convinced that the technology itself was the source of the problems? Bonnie’s remedy, of having assigned roles for members of the team, while solving her team’s problem, might have been unnecessarily restrictive for another team or could have pushed a non-participating or non-performing member of the team off to the side.

Bonnie is correct that one of the best reasons for project-based learning is that it is based on aspects of cooperation of which students may not be fully conscious. However, this also suggests that teachers must be fully versed on all aspects of project-based learning in order to troubleshoot learning processes. Complicating this is the fact that classrooms can become cross-cultural. So what happens when there is disagreement about what actually is cooperation?

Another reflection on Bonnie’s story

Bonnie’s story reinforces my thinking that teaching about collaboration should be kept to a minimum, except in very specific circumstances. As she says, how to use tools is a problem of sorts, but it needn’t be such a major one, and if the motivation (usually creating some kind of product) exists, there is no reason why problems of this sort can’t be solved.

The fact that Bonnie’s group used a range of tools suggests first that synchronous and asynchronous tools both have important roles to play, with the former perhaps being crucial in groups where delivery of a product is very time-sensitive. This story may also indicate support for the idea that different asynchronous tools work in different ways and are difficult to mold to nonarchetypal uses. But where that difficulty leads us is a matter of interpretation.

One interpretation would go something along these lines: A forum is necessary to discuss specific issues in both threaded and archived form; email is important for very time-sensitive discussion-type communications (and perhaps where two members have an interpersonal problem with another member); a wiki is necessary for the actual creation of the product. Another interpretation is that, because the participants appear not to have been given orientation in the use of tools, they muddled through somehow, without any tool-related drama, but without really mastering any of the tools and possibly suffering inefficiencies, and by extension also possibly turning in a product that was not quite as good as it could have been.

Such orientation itself is problematic, first because there is no clear consensus on how to use each tool, and second because it might reduce the possibilities for group-generated discoveries regarding the tools. However, the group might have benefited from instruction about the possibility of starting discussion in the wiki itself. This could avoid the problem of the wiki being seen as redundant in the first phase and, consequently, members being less fluent in its use when the second phase started. It might also have alleviated the relative sterility Bonnie experienced in “just discussing with our group”, because a wiki could facilitate the later incorporation of things initially offered as pure opinions, but actually included as seeds of a product.

One obvious question is whether they needed, or benefited from, multiple wikis and forums. Another tool-related question regards the use of really simple syndication (RSS), which can provide convenient regular updates of recent messages and changes: I wonder whether it might have been possible to reduce the number of channels, with possible efficiency gains, if RSS had been incorporated.

After these negative-sounding comments on tools, it may be appropriate here to reiterate: As Bonnie said, the members of the group were able to negotiate problems as they arose without any catastrophic consequences, and had the opportunity to experience first-hand a range of tools, while getting a sense for what works and what doesn’t work for each one.

Another point in Bonnie’s account is that it is very difficult to work together in a meaningful way without a clear goal. In a formal educational context, that usually has to be a goal imposed by, or negotiated under the guidance of, a teacher. The first two weeks might have worked better if they had been turned into a task to get a broad grasp of a body of knowledge, while getting to know the other group members and negotiating how to approach the topic and tasks to follow. Thus there would have been something very substantive to discuss in the forum, and the discussion about process could occur in the background, if necessary. Even more radically, the group could have been tasked with reading as much as they could manage of a large body of knowledge and summarizing it on the wiki that they would subsequently use for actually doing the project.

Finally, although some members are described as being at “almost zero” in terms of technical expertise, in other respects, they are mature and sophisticated compared to the students that most teachers will meet in most contexts. Thus, any kind of problem mentioned by such students has the potential to be many times magnified in other contexts. This reinforces the point made above that goals need to be clarified, and tasks not clearly linked to those goals have a high risk of failure. Therefore, teachers may need to come up with various ways of making explicit these linkages, perhaps by assigning tasks like reading a body of literature.

Additional comments from Bonnie

Reflecting further on this collaborative experience, I keep coming back to the group’s interpersonal dynamic. The first phase of completing the project was seemingly spent worrying about how we would work and doing busy work on the project itself. However, I think we were also doing the more important work of feeling our way with one another, learning how each of us interacts, and exploring which tools worked best for our unique mix of characters. While on the surface the initial phase felt fruitless, it was in fact creating the bedrock of how our group would work together. (Bonnie Johnston, personal correspondence, August 29, 2006)

What These Learners' Stories Represent

You could argue that those three stories are cream of the cream—not at all representative of learners that you might expect or hope to nurture or teach in ways of collaboration. You could accurately describe the learners whose stories we have shared as generally advanced, mature, motivated, and technologically sophisticated learners who continue to work, often collaboratively, with educational technology. However, with respect to online learner collaboration, what such learners are able to engage in, succeed at, and recollect, with so much insight on learners’ perspectives, still serves as a framework of inspiration for what we might expect of current and future online learners.

It is a cliché to invoke the notion of a wave of the future. However, as technological advances occur, we find ourselves with more and varied opportunities to interact with people unconstrained by time and space. To take full advantage of these advances, collaboration, in some form, is a necessity. Since a field like education potentially has the luxury of experimenting with collaboration for collaboration’s sake, by examining what collaboration may look like in ideal circumstances with ample preparation time and little or no pressure to produce end-products, we feel that a close examination of research in that field suggests possibilities for other professionals to take up in their own fields and teaching endeavours.