Abstract:

Teaching courses through Distance Learning (DL) is an integral part of the ever emerging paradigm of online education. Whether higher education becomes generalized within a broad liberal arts curriculum or a highly specialized degree developing specific skills, it behooves faculty to be aware of the realities of this emerging marketplace. Many employers also seek prospective new hires that demonstrate that the essential skills to write well, the ability to communicate confidently, and the ability to collaborate with others. Accordingly, many schools are attempting to meet these demands by using active learning techniques in their online or DL classes.
The author’s DL experiences, both in a purely online environment and in a multi-site video teleconferencing environment are specifically directed to the education of students in this challenging learning environment. This has evolved in many cases towards using active learning as an instrument to develop these skills. Active learning is an inclusive term that refers to several modalities of instruction and teaching. All of them focus the responsibility for learning on the students. Bonwell and Eison (1991) popularized the approach and it became the educational model for the 1990s. According to Mayer (2004) strategies like active learning developed out of the work of an earlier group of theorists who had promoted promoting discovery learning which had suggested that students who actively engage with the material are more likely to recall information later and be able to use that information in different contexts (Bruner, 1961). However, this claim is not always supported by the literature (Mayer, 2004; Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark, 2006). The author’s experiences suggest that, at times, the inability of active learning techniques to work well in the online or DL environment have less to do with the idea of active learning and more to do with how active learning is implemented. Examples of active learning activities include: class discussion, small group discussion, debate, posing questions to the class, think-pair-share activities, short written exercises and polling the class (Bonwell and Eison, 1991)..
This paper will consider how negative synergy can have potentially undesirable effects on student groups and activities, how that relates to group decision making, and suggest, prescriptively from experience, what to do whenever negative synergy is seen to be at work during group related active learning in the online or DL environment.

Keywords:

active learning, negative synergy, distance learning.