Collaborative learning: Politeness vs. complexity?

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So I seem to be living out a pattern in this course. Each topic brings new forms of skepticism and new discoveries related to collaborative learning and OOE (online open education). First, I find it super interesting but a little weird to be studying the very process in which we are engaged, like some reflective learning experiment. Of course I do think that there is no better way to learn about collaborative learning and OOE than by doing collaborative learning and OOE. But that doesn’t tell me much about how collaborative learning and OOE will work with teaching theory or methods. If the learners don’t know the material or skills, and where the skills lead, can they really help each other get there? Brindley et al. (2009) refer to some courses as having “static content” and do not include those types of courses in their cases studies for their assessment of learning processes online. I believe that is what I am teaching, so is that omission important? Is that where the boundary is? I can see that collaborative learning could be uniquely suited toward applications of skills learned. This prerequisite basis is one of the recommendations in the Brindley et al. paper. One of my group members in PBL8 also described the importance of prerequisite courses in his experience.

I also wonder about the part of collaborative learning that is based on peer feedback and critique, another prominent topic in the Brindley et al (2009) study. You have to be able to respond to each other’s ideas for collaboration to occur. You also should be able to understand a peer’s contribution. Peer review does not really work without careful orchestration sometimes. In my teaching the greatest problem I see with peer evaluation is that students are at such different levels that they can’t easily be helpful to each other. If a class is small enough and I take the time to do some sort of assessment and then match them on the basis of capabilities, then the exercise becomes more useful, but that is not always possible. In my PBL group, our expertise vary widely but we seem able to follow each other’s ideas well. In group meeting, we can riff off of each other’s ideas and the conversation develops nicely. But an unspoken boundary comes up when talking about anything written already. So when we contribute, that initial contribution stands untouched and is presented. In this topic’s presentation, we discussed overthrowing this boundary, and this time around we asked questions at least about the text that was written. But still, nothing developed further once a written contribution was submitted to the group. I interpret this as an healthily developed culture of niceness in our group, which I certainly appreciate.  I don’t feel frustrated at all with the group or the group work, as documented among online learners in Capdeferro and Romero (2012) study, probably for this very reason.

One interesting study I came across in my reading was a study by Kirschner et al. (2009) where they showed that the benefits of collaborative learning show up when the complexity of a task is high. The idea is that the more cognitive capacity you pool together, the more likely you are to be able to meet the cognitive demands of a given task if they are high. I do not think the tasks we are assigned in this course are complex. They certainly could be made complex, but there is no impetus for doing so because there is no set idea of how much depth the presentation should have. This made me wonder how different the process would look if we were to be given a complex and demanding task that we must do well on in order to complete the course successfully. I suspect it would look very different. I suspect it would be a lot more stressful. I suspect the course organizers have a reason for not setting up the course this way.

References

Brindley, J., Blaschke, L. M. & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 10(3).

Capdeferro, N. & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International review of research in open and distance learning, 13(2), 26-44.

Kirschner, F., Paas, F., & Kirschner, P. (2009). A Cognitive Load Approach to Collaborative Learning: United Brains for Complex Tasks. Educational Psychology Review, 21(1): 31-42. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-008-9095-2