Building connections in open online courses

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A vital motivator for most learners is the sense of being part of a community where your efforts are acknowledged and where you get support and encouragement both from teachers and peers. Ever since MOOCs came on the scene course designers have been searching for ways of building a sense of community even in large-scale courses of hundreds or even thousands of participants. Courses have discussion forums, volunteer facilitators/moderators, chatbots, options for self organising group work and so on, but the quest for that ideal solution to make these course more "sticky" continues. It is not enough to simply suggest groups and let the participants get on with it. The groups need to be guided and encouraged, rules of engagement need to be agreed on and a community of trust must be established and to do this usually requires a facilitator/moderator with experience in team-building. This is very hard to scale since it can be difficult to find enough people to act as facilitators and when it comes to courses with thousands of participants this becomes virtually impossible. Furthermore, good facilitation requires some degree of training. Thus, in a course where you aim at offering a consistent experience to all participants, facilitators should share a common idea of how to support the groups..

There is an excellent description of providing this kind of support on a relatively large scale in a post by Joitske Hulsebosch, Large-scale online course design? Use collaborative learning for high engagement. She describes the development of an open online course in food systems with an intake of around 500 participants. Learners are divided into groups though this is not compulsory and each group has a volunteer mentor to motivate and support them. The organisers put a lot of work into creating a course community with onboarding activities like interactive maps to show where everyone lives (enabling people to link with others in their region) and a gamification element rewarding contributions and active participation in activities. Groups are encouraged to create a name for their group thus forming a common identity and the establishment of group chats in Signal or Whatsapp is encouraged. They are also careful to make sure that those who start the course are sufficiently motivated.

In addition to social learning and good content, I think there were a number of other factors that helped to keep people engaged. First of all, a good intake and selection. People were asked if they had time (some answered no and were therefore not selected :)) and what their motivation was. The 500 fortunate participants were selected from more than 900 applications. In addition, there was continuous feedback from the experts and some mentors on the contributions. This was highly appreciated and even more feedback was requested. In addition, there was a clear structure with a final weekly assignment: the gateway to the next week. When all gates were completed, people could download a certificate. This was certainly an incentive for many participants.

In this way they achieved a 54% completion rate and high learner satisfaction, remarkable for this type of open course. This cannot compare to a regular campus course since the participants are doing the course in their spare time and it is not part of a degree programme that they are committed to with financial consequences for non-completion.  

It is clear that collaborative and social learning have contributed to keeping participants engaged in the food systems e-course. The organization and supervision takes time, but you can minimize it through clear instructions and the use of voluntary mentors. Online you have to look redefine participation differently compared to face-to-face. You will never get 100% of participants doing all learning activities. Someone who does not fully participate but does participate in two online sessions can also learn something from this what he / she wants to learn, self-management and making choices become more important. It seems that a percentage of 50% is a good achievement for a large-scale online course.

This approach is similar in many ways to our experience with a course called Open Networked Learning, aimed at university teachers who want to explore the opportunities and challenges of online teaching and learning. We are colleagues from four Swedish universities who organise the course and run it twice a year together with a network of up to 15 partner institutions from Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa and Singapore. It's on a smaller scale compared to the food systems course, with usually 100-130 participants from the 13-15 partner institutions plus about 30 open learners who are admitted each term on a first-come-first-served basis. We have a good completion rate, usually around 70-80% and this is largely due to the fact that group work is a central feature.

The focus of the course is problem-based learning (PBL) and we divide the participants into groups with 8 members per group. Each group has a facilitator from one of the partner institutions and a co-facilitator who is a former participant who volunteers to support a group as a study buddy; someone who knows how it feels to participate and can offer advice and understanding. We provide support for these facilitators in the form of a course guide and regular meetings to discuss the groups' progress and current issues. This way we hope to offer a consistent experience for all participants and all facilitators share a common approach to facilitation.

The institutional learners get local support and also receive a certificate (or in some cases credits) for their efforts whilst the open learners have no such foundation and this has sometimes led to lower motivation. To counter this we now we now offer online support sessions for them and the response has been extremely positive. We have also found that quite a few of our co-facilitators are former open learners who volunteer to return for another course where their only reward is a recognition certificate. They simply enjoy the course and want to continue to be a part of it. That in itself is a reward for us as organisers.

Theoretically anyone is free to follow the course since the activities (webinars, recordings and tweetchats) and the topic work are all available on the public course site. However we have found that those who try this option seldom stay for long since they do not have access to the course community and above all do not have the support and motivation of joining a group. So now before the course we contact all the open learners and inform them that participation in a group is a prerequisite for certification though they are welcome to follow informally on their own.

Our model is probably not very scaleable because recruiting and supporting the facilitators would be too time-consuming and increase the risk of groups not getting a consistent course experience. So we keep the numbers low by recruiting through the partner institutions and using word of mouth to attract open learners. The example of the food systems course described above does however show that maybe a certain upscaling is possible. It's a fine balance though to combine the intimacy of group work with a large scale course environment. 

Instruction or inquiry-based learning - it's not a choice

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Why do we keep believing in simple solutions to complex problems or that there is one best way to do something? This is sadly true in education where we should really know better by now. What is the best method/platform/tool for learning? Is online better or worse than classroom? Is group work better than self study? The answer is nearly always "it depends" but the comparisons and competition go on anyway. 

One of these debates is about the value of collaborative learning compared to the more traditional individual approach. Genuine collaboration, where a group works together to solve a problem by sharing knowledge, peer reviewing and discussing issues, is a powerful learning experience. But at the same time there are many pitfalls with many groups failing to reach the required level of mutual trust and respect to collaborate effectively. Groups who lack the critical level of knowledge and experience will often fumble, argue and fail or arrive at completely false conclusions. Learning to collaborate effectively is a lengthy process and needs to be guided and scaffolded by examples and feedback. Far too much group work in education can be seen as ineffective "busy work" that may look creative and engaging but does not really foster learning. 

There's an interesting critique of collaborative learning in a post by Zach Groshell, Do We Learn Best Collaboratively or Individually? He examines in particular a study from 2017, Can collaborative learning improve the effectiveness of worked examples in learning mathematics?, comparing students' performance in maths using traditional worked examples with individual study to collaborative problem-solving. Here the traditional approach was found to be more effective though collaborative work was sometimes effective for low complexity problems. 

Once again it's not a competition between two approaches; it's about when and how to use them. Collaboration requires experience and knowledge and is probably not going to work in an introductory course unless very clearly guided. Once the students have learned the basics and know how and where to search for more information as well as how to critically assess the quality of the search results, then collaborative learning can work very well. However they also need to be guided through the skills of team building and group dynamics so that they can establish the trust and common purpose that is necessary to collaborate.

Providing students with examples is effective, withholding examples from students when they could benefit from them is bizarre and irresponsible, and if teachers want students to have a shot at making sense of the examples they’re provided, it’s probably best that they study them individually, away from the attentional competition and extraneous noise that is the group dynamic.

Another problem with criticism of collaborative or inquiry-based learning is the idea that the students are simply left to their own devices and the teacher takes a more or less passive role (guide on the side). Collaborative work is described several times as unguided and this is surprising since most research into collaborative learning emphasizes the need for careful management, scaffolding and feedback from the teacher. Collaboration is a skill to be learned, not a spontaneous activity and this means careful guidance.

There's a good summary of the advantages and the pitfalls of inquiry-based learning in a couple of posts by Kath Murdoch, Inquiry learning: Pitfalls and perspectives part 1 and part 2. She recognizes the arguments in favour of a traditional approach but also demonstrates the strengths of inquiry when it is well-supported and scaffolded by the teacher. 

When understood well, inquiry learning actually demands careful design of authentic learning experiences, attention to existing schema, deft questioning, ongoing assessment, the cultivation of curiosity and the ability to plan and teach through concepts. The teacher’s role is critical.

The key once again is that learning is a complex process with so many variables and there is never only one "best" method no matter how much we wish for one. Teaching involves being able to choose the right mix of methods and tools for each learning situation, often offering alternative paths. Traditional instruction might work very well in certain situations and with some students, but will certainly not work for everyone, neither will any other method. This is well expressed in an article by Alan Reid (University of South Australia) in The Conversation, Teachers use many teaching approaches to impart knowledge. Pitting one against another harms education.

There’s a variety of useful teaching models — and this includes explicit instruction — which have been designed for different purposes. It is the educator’s task to select the most appropriate given the context.

Creating simplistic binaries in a field as complex and nuanced as education impoverishes the debate.

We need more discussion about the art of designing courses using a broad template of methods and tools and less needless comparisons between A and B.

Saying something stupid - giving students time to think

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How often do you wish you could delete something you said or at least get a chance to reformulate it? I do almost every day. In conversations and meetings we often make spontaneous comments that were not well formulated or even thought through. In discussion forums I sometimes edit something I wrote in haste, or I write a new statement showing that I have revised my idea. However, in spoken communication or indeed on Twitter it's hard to edit or retract. Once it's out there a remark can fly off into circulation - as many indiscreet celebrities and politicians can confirm. As a result, many people are reluctant to speak in meetings (physical or digital) in fear of saying something that may come back to haunt them in the future. Fear of revealing your vulnerability, that you don't really understand the topic yet and are fumbling for clarity.

Learning is all about changing your mind. New information and arguments mean that we are constantly reforming and refining our opinions. Curiously the media tend to attack politicians who change their mind about an issue seeing it as a sign of weakness instead of realising that we are constantly changing our opinion as new facts and ideas are assimilated. Of course we have very fixed basic principles of what is right and wrong but the rest is flexible. Changing your opinion is a sign that you are learning and can listen to other arguments.

So how can we work with this in teaching? I think it's important to give students time to refine their ideas before they go into a class discussion. If you ask a question in class you are often met with silence. They all have answers but they're not ready to share them yet. If you want a good discussion you need to let them formulate and refine their ideas first in a secure setting. In an online class for example, this can be done by asking everyone to take a pen and paper, turn off cameras and microphones and spend, say, five minutes to write down responses to a question you ask. Then put them in pairs where each partner explains their answer uninterrupted for a couple of minutes and then they briefly discuss these answers. When the class is back together again they can all share their answers anonymously using a polling tool like Mentimeter or AnswerGarden. The ideas have now been refined through pair discussion but it's good to let them appear without names. Then the variety of responses can be the basis of larger group discussions where the group can formulate a new answer that is more mature. Finally we can start a class discussion where the fear of saying something "stupid" has been reduced significantly. This process can also be prepared asynchronously before the online meeting and then letting them discuss in pairs or small groups so that they all have something to contribute to the class discussion.

The main point is to build a foundation for discussion rather than plunging straight in. If we allow for a period of silence before expecting any answers there is a greater chance that more people will contribute. We can't always use the method I explained above but when you ask a question in a meeting or class tell people to think about it for even a couple of minutes before inviting answers. More thoughtful answers are worth a couple of minutes of awkward silence.

PS

Soon after publishing this post I came across a very relevant article by Nikole D. Patson on the same theme: Collaborative Note-taking as an Alternative to Recording Online Sessions.

Who's afraid of group work?

Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels

Many webinars and online conferences today try to increase engagement by sending participants into small breakout groups, giving everyone the chance to contribute to the discussion. Evaluations show that most participants appreciate the opportunity to talk with colleagues and exchange ideas rather than simply listening to guest speakers. However, every time I set up a group activity I notice that some participants simply leave the meeting. Many colleagues have noticed this behaviour and it seems that for some people the prospect of group discussion is not appealing. Working in groups is an important skill and a vital part of the student experience, but is it always essential in webinars and conferences where participants are attending voluntarily and are not being assessed in any way?  

I have read comments that group work can be stressful when you are suddenly thrown into a group with total strangers and expected to have a meaningful discussion in only 20 minutes. Sometimes there are group members who dominate the session giving no room for other contributions. Other times there is an awkward silence when no-one really has a strong opinion about the question posed by the organisers. A few have commented that they attended the webinar to learn about a subject they knew very little about and therefore wanted to listen to the experts rather than discussing with other people who also knew very little about the subject. Some group members do not have a microphone or camera and cannot contribute at all or others have a very poor internet connection resulting in poor audio, echo or other strange noises. And some people just don't like group work and prefer to reflect alone.

What can we learn from this then? Here are some ideas but I'm sure there are more.

• Zoom's new function that allows participants to choose which group they join or even to change group can help. At the same time, it can lead to confusion as people move from one group to another and thus disturbing potentially good discussions.
• Offering an opt-out option before group work. Those who do not wish to join a group can stay in the main room and simply mute and switch off cameras and use the time for quiet reflection. Make it clear that this option is just as valid as joining a group. What they do with that time is up to them but maybe they will still be there when the groups return. 
• Don't overdo the collaborative elements in a conference or webinar. Many people really enjoy just listening to an expert and have no need to discuss all the time. There is always a risk that group work is included without any real purpose other than just to make the session look interactive. Too many polls, breakout sessions, word clouds etc can get very tiresome.
• Group work takes time to be useful. Explain why you're doing it, "sell" the benefits and give them at least 20 minutes to discuss, preferably longer. Less time is generally pointless. Remember that six strangers who land together in a room need a few minutes for introductions and ice-breaking before starting the discussion.

Let's stop generation generalisation

"Tube/London Underground ”Mind the Gap”." (CC BY-SA 2.0) by drivethrucafe

More than ever we seem to love making sweeping and often dangerous generalisations about sections of the population. Despite a complete lack of scientific evidence, we are continually drawn to narratives that assume that everyone born between certain dates, in a certain geographical area or even the entire population of the world not born in our particular country all share common personality traits. I've written about this many times but I was particularly fond of a heart-felt appeal against simplified generalisations in an article in Forbes Austria by Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree, The made-up nonsense about generations at work.

Concepts such as Generation X/Y/Z or Millennials are often used to justify educational and corporate strategies, workplace design and even government policy on the grounds that these groups have a completely different mindset to older generations. This entire generation, according to the narratives, want flexibility, freedom, adventure, fun and personal development and don't want to be trapped into old-fashioned ideas like job security. They are said to be constantly changing jobs and always looking for new challenges. Minaar and de Morree decided to do some research into this and came up with results that largely bust the myths. So-called millennials actually don't change jobs any more today than 20 years ago (around 3%) and when asked about what qualities were most valued in any workplace the answers from all generations were largely the same: purpose, meaning, freedom, autonomy, fun, and personal development.

I suspect that the reason many young people do change jobs is due to the abundance of short-term contracts and project jobs that are often the only form of employment available. Given the choice most people have very similar ambitions and job security is probably top of the list for us all. Without that basic security, knowing that you'll still have the job next month and even next year, is essential to foster the sense of community and mutual trust that in turn leads to creativity and efficiency in an organisation. Insecurity and competition on the other hand leads often to fear and mistrust.

The article ends with a plea to look beyond these convenient and often empty generalisations and realise that the generation gap is not as wide as we would like to think. This applies as much to the workplace as it does in education.

It’s time to stop believing all this made-up nonsense of different generational needs and the blaming cultures that result from it. We better start figure out our similarities and our expectations when it comes to creating highly inspiring workplaces. It’s time to start asking employees what they want in the workplace, regardless of their age and regardless of the generation they belong to. Only then we can make a radical shift in the way we organize work. Only then we can create more human, more engaging and more thriving organizations.

Not lurking but learning

   by 酷哥哥 on Flickr

I'd like to return to one of my favourite topics of late - online participation or the lack of it. Just as it is quite normal to appreciate music without dancing or singing along, we need to accept the fact that many people can learn a lot without actively taking part in discussions and group work. In fact one important phase in learning is a period where you silently observe and listen to those with more experience and tune into the field you are studying.

I enjoyed therefore reading a post on this theme by Dave White called Elegant lurking where he argues that we all need periods of silent learning before daring to participate. This is especially true in online communities.

All successful Social Media platforms allow for Lurking in some form. It allows individuals to tune into the ‘dialect’ of a particular network or community so that when they first decide to say something they’re reasonably confident it will be in an acceptable tone. Some learners will choose never to speak-up though, especially if they are following an intimidating network of venerable ‘thought leaders’ or if they assume they won’t be responded to.

The same applies of course in face-to-face groups, courses or clubs. New members may attend several meetings getting accustomed to the group culture before they dare to speak up. Some may never contribute but will follow the discussions with great interest and will learn a lot without needing to demonstrate the fact to the others. This is what is meant by elegant lurking; quiet low-key participation where learning is not overtly demonstrated. 

Supporting students to move towards this transition should be central to the overall trajectory of our pedagogy in more nuanced ways than simply assigning marks to the act of blog posting. Elegant Lurking is an important ingredient in the subtle business of becoming a member of a community.

The crucial moment is when you dare to make that first comment or ask that possibly "stupid" question. This is your official membership application and the reaction of the community can make the difference between your full participation or dropping out. It's so important that the teacher(s) or other leading members recognize a newcomer's first contribution and provide supportive feedback as soon as possible. Many will doubt their own competence and so any negative replies or lack of response will be seen as proof that they do not belong and result in that person leaving the group. At the same time we shouldn't pressurize everyone to contribute but accept that many will learn a lot by elegantly lurking. When they feel like joining in they will.

The silent majority - why are MOOC forums counterproductive?

 by James Cridland

The discussion forum is a central feature of all learning management systems and the focus for most online courses. Often it's the only interactive feature in the course but it's notoriously difficult to generate real discussion there. Too few participants and it will probably never take off. Too many and it becomes chaotic. In many cases students only post in the forum because there are credits at stake and very often the real discussion takes place elsewhere; on Facebook or Google Hangouts for example.

So if the forums of regular online courses are difficult to run effectively they will prove almost impossible in a MOOC with potentially tens of thousands of participants. Nonetheless most MOOCs persist with them as a token attempt at interaction or because the forum is somehow a default setting in online learning. Generally MOOC forums become overwhelming and chaotic with hundreds of unrelated threads and the vast majority of participants take one look and never return. An article in Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, reinforces this impression that forums are actually counter-productive:

"Ironically, the biggest obstacle preventing MOOC students from forming relationships is the feature most relied on to encourage them."

A dynamic forum is like gathering people in a room and asking them to discuss. A class of say 30 will divide into smaller groups and it is easy to move over to a new group when you want to. There's a clear structure to the interactions and it's easy to get an overview. However if you add a few thousand strangers into the mix it gets completely chaotic and effective communication is likely to break down. Some forums are dominated by so-called super posters, students who can be responsible for up to 25% of a forums total posts (see report on a recent Stanford University survey in eCampus News Sept 2013 p6). Their enthusiasm might inspire a few but will intimidate less confident participants. The same survey shows that only one in ten students posted more than once in MOOC forums and the vast majority wrote absolutely nothing. A major factor to the inactivity is that most people are simply not used to online discussion and see learning as an information transfer from teacher to student. Media literacy is a clear issue here.

Another problem I have noticed in MOOC forums is the presence of expert participants. Many teachers and researchers are taking MOOCs out of curiosity and as a way to expand their professional networks. Very valid reasons and I am guilty as charged. However the danger of having over-qualified participants is that their contributions to the discussions can set an impossibly high standard that can intimidate the new learners. There are also MOOCs which are also regular for-credit courses mixing full-time campus students with thousands of MOOCers. The regular students will inevitably set the tone of the discussion. Maybe these two groups should somehow be kept apart since they have such widely different motives for participating. They can inspire and motivate each other but I suspect they can also intimidate, irritate and confuse. I'd be very interested in reading any research on this issue.

So if a massive anarchic forum is not the way to encourage meaningful discussion in a MOOC, what is? The Campus Technology article lists a number of examples. One way is to encourage small-scale groups using whatever networking tool is most appropriate for the participants, such as a Facebook group. Basically break up the massive crowd into friendly neighbourhoods. Another way is to create focused interactions such as a question and answer session with a tutor where the structure is clear and within a given time frame.

"So instead of trying to force a free-flowing conversation in the live session, Greene and her colleagues took advantage of students' eagerness to pose questions in the forums. "The second week, we ran a question-and-answer session with topics we had prepared," she explains, "formed by what was coming up on the [forum] thread." The blend helped students feel like participants in the live session without being pressured to interact with the experts on the spot."

Interestingly many MOOCs are using synchronous online meetings as an effective discussion area where a teacher meets with a limited number of students to deal with questions using for example Google Hangouts. These are also situations that most participants will feel comfortable with reflecting traditional classroom practice that all are familiar with.

There is of course no patented answer to this problem but maybe we should think at least twice before launching a MOOC with a common discussion forum in the middle. Maybe that's the one element we should drop.

Organizing freedom

  by kevin dooley

One of my favourite songs by Björk has a great line: "I thought I could organize freedom, how Scandinavian of me." Although massive open online courses are not very Scandinavian the folly of trying to organize freedom comes to mind when considering the criticism that MOOCs are facing from many quarters.

If MOOCs are really going to change education they have to break away from traditional course structure and find a new model.  The original MOOC concept (cMOOC) developed by Siemens, Downes, Cormier and others is based on students forming networks, creating content, collaborating, discussing and basically taking charge of their own learning. The course leaders provide a basic framework and a common meeting place but otherwise students work things out themselves. The model is learner centred and there is no clear linear progression through pre-planned course modules as you would find on a traditional campus course or on a traditional e-learning course.

However the MOOC model made famous by Coursera and edX, often named as xMOOC, is rather traditional and resembles a regular campus or online course with a clear syllabus and organised group work. The traditional universities running these courses don't seem to fully realize that you simply can't organize 50,000 students the way you can organize 50. Teachers are trying to run a regular course and even trying to organize students into study groups using tools that simply aren't scaleable to that level. That's what happened to the Coursera course, Fundamentals of Online Education, that was suspended recently when it got too chaotic. A case of trying to organize freedom.

This is well expressed in an article by Debbie Morrison called How Does Collaborative Learning Work in Closed Online Courses vs. MOOCs?. She describes the differences between cMOOCs, xMOOCs and COLCs (closed, online, for-credit learning, course). COLCs are the regular online for-credit courses that universities all over the world have been offering for over 15 years. Organized group work is an essential element to these courses and group assignments are designed and monitored by the teacher. Teacher guidance is a key element since students are often unused to collaborating online. The mistake made by some xMOOC designers is to try to offer the same level of guidance and control. The sheer numbers of students makes this task impossible and we need to realize that MOOCs must be allowed to be rather chaotic and where outcomes are on an individual level rather than expecting everyone to follow the same path all the way.

"What we do know is that instructors involved with massive courses, with thousands of students can’t control the outcomes of course, can’t direct the learning in a given direction, and can’t use an instructional strategy and methods that work for traditional courses. But the concept of the Web as a classroom that can bring learning to thousands that want to learn about a given topic is There is great potential in reaching students all over the world, and many of these MOOCs have already changed and improved lives of thousands."

Massive online courses need a new model and need to be clearly differentiated from traditional university courses. They are not competing but providing new paths to learning. Exactly which methods work and which do not is still being worked out. 

Space to think

We learn through collaboration, discussion and sharing. However we also learn by quiet contemplation and by the often solitary processes of reading and writing. Most levels of education today, both classroom and online, stress the importance of group work and our ability to function in groups is highly valued. However there's a risk that we are forgetting the importance of working alone and thereby losing the opportunity to think deeply.

This is the theme of an excellent TED talk by Susan Cain called The power of introverts where she argues the case of all introverts who aren't comfortable with group work and seldom contribute to class discussions. This is not because they have nothing to contribute - often quite the contrary - but that they need time to think before expressing themselves. Classroom discussions are generally dominated by a few confident students and group work is also dominated by those who enjoy speaking and being the centre of attention. Crowds are not always as wise as we think and are sometimes easily lead to the wrong conclusions by dominant or manipulative members, both in class and online. She argues that society puts too much emphasis on groups and social interaction and sees solitary activities as negative. Offices are now mostly open landscapes and few people have the luxury of a quiet space to work. Open spaces can be creative but creativity also needs peace and quiet.

A teacher's perspective on this issue is presented in a blog post by Monica Edinger, In the Classroom: A Few Classroom Teaching Suggestions from an Introverted Teacher. She presents a selection of strategies to enable the less vocal students have a say in class discussions. This involves waiting for answers in silence rather than always feeling obliged to say more. It also involves not giving the dominant speakers so much space to dominate, doing much less group work and giving students more time and space to think. Written communication, often as an online private dialogue between student and teacher, gives more introvert students a more appropriate channel to reflect and discuss their learning.

The main idea behind the concepts of flexible or blended learning is that we have the tools and methods to let students learn the way that suits them best. There is a need for dynamic group work and that must be available but we shouldn't forget that many people learn best on their own and need more space to learn. The secret is in the mix.

The frustrations of collaborative learning

  by  bookgrl

Learning is a social process and the ability to collaborate, whether online or face-to-face, is a key skill for schools and colleges to foster. The advantages of collaborative learning are clear and have been discussed on this blog many times. However there is always a darker side to everything and a new report has caught my attention. It's called Are Online Learners Frustrated with CollaborativeLearning Experiences? (IRRODL, Vol 13, no 2, 2012) and has been written by Neus Capdeferro and Margarida Romero of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Spain. They have investigated students' frustration with online collaboration and outlined some of the problem areas.

Traditional e-learning was largely an online correspondence course where students worked their way through the material and tests largely on their own with little or no demands for collaboration. This method is still very common and suits many learners. Since online learners generally have full-time employment, families and other commitments synchronous meetings are extremely hard to organize even for small study groups. Students have different preferences for when they study and how intensively they study. Increasingly collaborative online courses demand that students with highly diverse study methods, schedules and attitudes work together in often randomly selected groups. Many thrive on this type of collaboration but others find it extremely frustrating and can even be counter productive to learning.

The study identified a number of sources for frustration in collaborative online learning, amongst which are the following:

• Imbalance of commitment between group members
• Lack of shared goals
• Communication difficulties
• Imbalance of individual contributions
• Negotiation problems
• Workload sharing and time spent on tasks
• Conflict in reaching consensus

A lot of problems arise from students' attitudes to learning and previous experience. Students who expect to be able to study independently and at their own pace are likely to be frustrated when forced to collaborate with students with different priorities and study habits. Having to work with others can be seen as an unwelcome distraction.

Some students coming to online collaborative learning for the first time do not care for the idea of group work and can be apathetic or even on occasion actively hostile to the whole idea (Roberts & McInnerney, 2007).

Getting everyone in the group to agree on commitment levels and ensuring that all make equal contributions can involve lengthy discussions, reminders and irritation. Often the lion's share of the burden is taken by one or two group members and others make only marginal contributions. This is especially unfair when the assessment is at group level since the teacher cannot see who contributed what.

"In our study, we observed that the students’ main source of self-declared frustration is the teammates’ commitment imbalance. Preparing the learner for collaboration through instruction and development of the social and group skills necessary to work effectively in a group will have a positive effect upon the collaborative experience (Chapman & van Auken, 2001; Tideswell, 2004)."

The report advises a greater level of teacher involvement, both in first introducing and establishing guidelines for collaboration and then being able to help groups where collaboration is not working.

"The analysis of student frustration in our study also shows that assessment inequities are important sources of frustration; the implication for institutions is that they must conduct a coherent assessment. The use of individual, self, peer, and group assessment techniques can be extremely beneficial for both students and instructors in all forms of online collaborative learning (Roberts, 2005)."

Collaboration is never easy even in face-to-face situations and many of the frustrations voiced in this study remind me of experience from projects and classroom projects I have been part of. The main problem this study lifts is that many students are unprepared for collaborative learning in whatever form it may take and that guidance and coaching is required before the course starts. One of the main lessons learnt from taking part in any type of training is the ability to work in teams and all the negotiation skills that entails.

Process more important than result

There was a  pre-conference day before the EFQUEL Innovation Forum devoted to user generated content (known to its friends as UGC). UGC is defined as free educational resources that have not gone through process of peer review. Often it is a web site, wiki or group blog that has been created by learners and freely shared. Generating content is an important part of the learning process by providing involvement, motivation and performance. This is the focus of an important European project called CONCEDE which aims to:

"... improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by enhancing the quantity and quality of user generated content that can be incorporated into higher education learning provision."

The project aims at creating a quality framework for user generated content using a mix of users' comments, reviews and ratings as well as institutional quality procedure and find a way of creating a system of trust for UGC. If we can easily see that a learning resource has been endorsed by many and fulfills clear criteria we are more likely to use it.

Here's a film from Swinburne University in Australia describing the process of creating UGC, in this case a student wiki (see film on original site)



This type of quality control is essential work if UGC is going to be used in mainstream education. However, I wonder if the value of this type of content lies more in the process of creation than in the finished product? Creating a quality resource involves a wide range of skills: collaborating, defining, researching, categorizing, creating, adapting, editing and reviewing. The end product is a source of pride for all involved but the journey was the most valuable part. This was described by Steve Wheeler in his presentation as an example of paragogy – peers helping each other to learn in a collaborative process (push) instead of being “pulled” by the teacher.

However, once completed, it is often not as valuable as it was during the process of creation. Other learners may well use the material in their studies and some may even build on it but anyone wishing to investigate the same subject would probably try to start from scratch and build their own site. I have several abandoned wikis as a case in point. It was great fun while I was working on them but once I'd reached the end I just left them to their own devices. I don't think anyone has taken them over but their value to me was in the process not the result.

Maybe by having quality markers and reviews in place these resources will not fade and die but may find new curators. Anyone wanting to take care of my mothballed wikis is welcome to do a makeover!

Are crowds wise?

The wisdom of the crowd is another concept that seems wonderfully simple at first but suffers under closer examination (the other being the net generation). The concept of collective wisdom being more valid than individual wisdom gained global coverage through the work of James Surowiecki in 2004 (The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations) and there are many convincing examples of mass collaboration being extremely successful; Wikipedia, Digg, Amazon and many more.

This concept has been a driving force behind the development of Web 2.0; the power of collaboration. Surowiecki noted however that not all crowds are wise and that there are a number of prerequisites for wisdom: the members of the crowd should be independent of each other and represent a diversity of opinions.

I read an article in Read Write Web called The dirty little secret about the "Wisdom of the Crowds"- there is no crowd. It claims that the crowds behind many of the success stories like Wikipedia are actually a small number of dedicated enthusiasts plus a large mass of relatively passive members whose contribution is negligible. Evidently very few actually bother to vote on Amazon and Digg and so the aggregated wisdom represents a much smaller crowd than we previously assumed. I saw an analysis of Wikipedia entries a while ago and although a subject had been edited by hundreds of people about 90% of the editing had been carried out by 2 people, the others had been content to edit a sentence of a misprint.

The conclusion is that crowds can be intelligent but not always. Crowds are unlikely to come up with a stroke of real genius but are good for brainstorming, editing and revising. It's wise to remember that the crowd is seldom as large as it seems.

Group work - creative or conformist?

There's a post on Psyblog that I found interesting called Why group norms kill creativity. There is considerable evidence it seems that group work can actually stifle creativity due to the fact that groups tend to be focused on reaching a consensus. Groups quickly establish norms that govern their interaction and because of these norms it is very difficult to propose radically different ideas if they threaten the balance of the group.

We've all been in situations where you realize that your opinion is in conflict with the rest of the group and the most diplomatic move is to go with the flow or to make your idea more palatable. But what if your original proposal was right? How many good ideas have been sacrificed to please the group? Are there significant differences between working in physical groups and working in net-based groups?

George Siemens comments nicely on his blog, elearnspace:
"Wisdom of the crowds is often misinterpreted as suggesting that people are intelligent when they think together. It’s more accurate to say that people are intelligent when they think alone and that this intelligence is amplified when they connect. It’s a subtle but vital distinction. A homogeneous group is often not very effective at creativity. Individual diversity, connected, produces substantial advances. A group can refine, extend, augment, and even perfect certain concepts and ideas."

In education we assume that working in groups is good in that students will offer mutual support and provide a social dimension to the learning process. However, not all students appreciate the benefits of groups and I recently heard of students actually dropping out of courses due to a group assignment. Group work can indeed be frustrating when so much energy is required reaching a consensus or if some members are not willing to pull their weight. Some part-time distance students can only study late in the evenings making synchronous meetings with the rest of the group almost impossible.