Abstract:

Learning is a social act and occurs through solving problems and seeking to understand the world. Pre-service students can have a meaningful learning experience by participating in collaborative online international learning (COIL) settings. The article describes the experiences of a purposefully sampled group of twenty (20) pre-service students finishing their third year in South Africa. Furthermore, the paper looks at the problems or challenges these students encountered while completing the COIL project, their experiences working in groups, and their perspectives on the benefits and drawbacks of the online collaborative learning that they undertook. Through the prism of an online collaborative framework, the results of a mixed method study are discussed. The gathering of qualitative data came after the collection of quantitative data to shed light on some of the quantitative findings as well as to confirm findings (triangulation). The semester-long collaborative online international learning program concentrated on design, facilitation, and direction. The online questionnaire results were generated by QuestionPro and thematic analysis of the qualitative data was mainly deductive in nature. The findings demonstrated that a collaborative project gave pre-service teachers a platform to experiment with technology integration as a manner of communicating with the content, while exploring diversity and inclusion. Because of the positive general perceptions, collaboration, professional perspectives, the development of content knowledge and pedagogical practice were effectively created. The article ends with a suggestion that the pre-set COIL project be redesigned to incorporate the improvement of leadership and self-management abilities.

Keywords:

Collaborative online learning, online teaching, collaboration, pre-service students.