Learning in communities – cooperation or collaboration?

In ONL171 Topic 3 our mission was to investigate learning in communities. As a teacher and course designer this is a topic which is always on my mind, both in IRL and online courses. Learning is done when people transform knowledge to learning by processing the knowledge in their brain. An excellent way to do this is to collaborate with peers during the processing part. So, for me as a teacher the question is:

- How do I make my students appreciate learning together?

- How can I help them develop the skills needed to learn together?

- How can I design my courses so that they maximize learning together?

- What is the best way to handle students which are not doing their part?

It is not always easy to make students appreciate learning together and especially not collaboration. Many students will just divide the assignment among them and then do a final writing session together before they hand the assignment in, that is they will cooperate. Also in ONL171, although we are all experienced learners, this was how we addressed the first topics. In our case it was not because we did not understand the benefit of collaborative work, but rather that cooperation takes less time. Therefore, I think that as a teacher you need to continually discuss; Why are we collaborating? What is the gain?

Palloff and Pratt 2005 has summarized the benefits of collaborative learning in a nice way:

• Development of critical thinking and skills.

• Co-creation of knowledge and meaning.

• Reflection.

• Transformative learning.

I believe that it's important, both as teacher and student, to recognize that collaboration requires specific skills. In the beginning it is most likely difficult for students to reach the level of collaboration and instead they are cooperating. Our mission as teachers must then be to guide them towards cooperation. This, of course, require us as teachers to have the skills to collaborate ourselves and to guide our students. Nb one then has to be to establish; What is cooperation and collaboration? One definition I have found and like was written by Ted Panitz in 1999: “Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction and personal lifestyle where individuals are responsible for their actions, including learning and respect the abilities and contributions of their peers. Cooperation is a structure of interaction designed to facilitate the accomplishment of a specific end product or goal through people working together in groups.”

Collaboration online might be even harder in the beginning. Siemens (2002), who has proposed a theory of learning - connectivism, sees four stages of interactions between learners in online courses: (1) Communication, (2) Collaboration, (3) Cooperation and (4) Community. He proposes that online courses usually communicates and cooperates rather than collaborate or feel as a community. Birndley et al 2009 gives some suggestions of how we can work toward collaboration in online learning. They advocate including small group learning design to favor collaboration, this leads to participation of students and development of teamwork skills as well as a sense of community. They also emphasizes the importance of continuously evaluating the design of collaboration work to know how student enrolled in the course are actually performing so that the course design can be adjusted to benefit collaboration.

As a course designer/coordinator/examiner for an online course I feel that I really have to think seriously about how to make the students collaborate rather than only cooperate. In this course, students are divided into smaller groups of about 6 students. They write 4 independent assignments which they discuss in the groups online. Then they evaluate a project and write a report about this evaluation together before writing an individual examination assignment in the end of the course. They reach communication and cooperation and maybe during special circumstances a group here or there reaches collaboration, but that is rare. The major reason for this is probably lack of time and differences in ambition, this course is a part time course and most students are working full time on the side which makes time a real issue. The reason for enrolling also differs a lot, some student have an inner motivation while other mainly enroll because their work requires it and they want to pass with minimal effort. As examiner I can see that the course design leads to a good increase in knowledge of learning outcomes, but I would really want them to learn more about collaboration as well.

I hope that the next topic in ONL171 will give me some inspiration on how to optimize the course design to favor collaboration!

#ONL171 #onlineeducation #highereducation #collaborationvscooperation