Abstract:

The father of "social learning", Vygotsky, claimed that collaborative learning teams attain higher level thinking and preserve information for longer times than students working individually. Collaborative working in a learning environment could be defined as the act of two or more students working together for a particular purpose or project. In this sense, it is usual in recent history to find many examples of famous couples working hand in hand to accomplish scientific or shocking discoveries, like Marie and Pierre Curie, Watson and Crick or more recent the Spanish Severo Ochoa and Carmen Cobian. So from that, we can extrapolate that Collaborative e-learning developers might work as a powerful network sharing new data and results to develop projects in a more productive and profitable way.

At this point, our group comprises 10 highly motivated Cheminformatics teachers from the Faculty of Pharmacy and we have proposed a project focused on different strategies using collaborative e-learning work, in order to implement not only the scores, but also social abilities and new skills. Further details and discussion will be shared to encourage teachers keeping up with new inspiring ideas to keep learning and to show how the student can benefit from the collaboration tools.

References:
[1] Bruffee, Kenneth (1993). Collaborative Learning. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 28–51.
[2] Dillenbourg, P., & Tchounikine, P. (2007). Flexibility in Macro-Scripts for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 23(1), 1-13.
[3] Kollar, I., Fischer, F., & Hesse, F. (2006). Collaboration Scripts--A Conceptual Analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 18(2), 159-185.

Keywords:

Collaborative e-learning, collaborative work and Cheminformatics.