Abstract:

Collaborative Learning is emerging as an important learning method. It is an educational approach to teaching and learning that involves groups of learners working together to solve a problem, complete a task, or create a product. This paper describes a comprehensive approach to collaborative inquiry of medical physics at Arabian Gulf University. The collaborative module comprises (1) an interactive Medical Physics WebCT virtual learning environment that provides students with shared workspaces for coordinating and recording their collaboration in scientific inquiry; (2) activity plans for inside and outside fields visits worked out collaboratively by each subgroup and the tutors; (3) Medical physics diagnostic and application dialogue (learning problems) and Web-based materials designed to match and enrich the module and (4) individual and group assessment given to students to guide their learning process , and help them scientifically report and evaluate their collaboration inquiry experience. The main of this work is to shift the learning process and redesign medical physics sessions at AGU form a teacher center to learner center activities and support learner-learner interaction, learner-content interaction, and learner-tutor interaction to a degree that facilitate deep learning. The results indicate that collaborative learning enabled the participates to easily communicate with their teachers (resource people, tutors and professor) and their peer search for answers for themselves and to assess their own expertise, resulting in the enhancement of knowledge, skills, attitude and satisfaction with learning which clearly reflected on group achievement in the final medical physics exam scores.

Keywords:

collaborative learning, inquiry learning, virtual learning environments (vles), medical.