ONLINE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND PATTERNS OF COORDINATION IN LEARNING GROUPS

For many years, theories of collaborative learning tended to focus on how individuals function in a group. This reflected a position that was dominant both in cognitive psychology and in artificial intelligence in the 1970s and early 1980s, where cognition was seen as a product of individual information processors, and where the context of social interaction was seen more as a background for individual activity than as a focus of research (Dillenbourg, et al., 1996).

More recently, the group itself became the unit of analysis and the focus shifted to more emergent, socially constructed, properties of the interaction. So, the focus has been no longer on what might be taking place “in the heads” of individual learners, but what was taking place between and among them in their interactions. (Stahl, Koshman & Suthers, 2006).

We have conducted a research to analyze whether patterns of coordination of virtual groups performing a collaborative writing task, are affecting the learning of its members and whether there is a correlation between the coordination patterns and the learning outcomes of individual students. We used three patterns of group coordination, based on the researches of Engel and Onrubia (2009, 2010): parallel, sequential and inclusive.

The research sample was 41 students from a Master’s degree, who developed a collaborative work in groups for 4 weeks. Their goal was to make a shared report to resolve a case about how to implement ICTs in schools and classrooms. Our research focused on analyzing the patterns of collaboration of the 11 groups and their relation to knowledge construction.

The results show that a coordination pattern linked to a distribution of work in which all students share and review the written material (inclusive pattern) in online groups, is related to an improvement in student learning.

As results corroborate this relationship, a number of new implications are derived from the research, as, for example, trainer’s ability to influence the coordination of groups to improve their learning processes and outcomes of knowledge construction.