I am
running really late with my blog post this time. ‘Life’ happens and several
commitments create conflicts. – Anyways, I try to dedicate at least a bit of
time to reflect on these weeks’ topic. My PBL group mainly focused on collaboration
and what facilitates it in online communities. In the end, we realized only few
things are really different offline or online regarding collaboration. So, we
discussed about facilitating collaboration.

We touched one
aspect only slightly, but it struck me: ‘The strongest motivator to engage in
collaborative learning is a previous beneficial experience of collaborative
learning.’ This is quite a paradigm, but some of us can relate to it. At some
point (not always to blame school, but often), group work had a negative
connotation, strong association with social loafing and wasted time. Indeed, a
while ago I had profound doubts how group work would yield anything beyond what
everybody could have done by themselves. Well, few social skills and
observations, maybe. However, -incidental- positive experience of collaboration
and collaborative learning completely changed my view. After experiencing true
synergistic effects of teamwork in learning (vet school), project work
(volunteering) or research (doctoral studies and post doc) I became a true ‘believer’
in collaborative learning. Nonetheless, ONL is such an experience for many of
us, and for me clearly regarding online collaboration. To realize that the
collaboration is a true synergy, i.e. has yielded more learning success (or any
outcome) than the mere sum of individual efforts is very powerful.

Nonetheless,
this prompts two questions: 1) What makes a group work become a teamwork with
true collaboration and synergistic effects? 2) How can we overcome the paradigm
that the best motivator for collaboration is previous collaboration? I attempt
an answer, even though it is far from complete. Still, here is my
understanding, so far:

1) In my
opinion, it is not a single factor that prompts good collaboration. A good mix
of people with a reasonable common goal can already do the job. When thinking
about ONL, success factors seem to be the concept that is completely optimized
for collaborative learning, skilled facilitation, and the motivation of the
participants, who volunteered to join the course and want to get the most out
of it. (Whatever that may be for everyone). Openness certainly helps, and previous
experience is beneficial as stressed already. I will not yield a complete list,
here. But I wonder, how to facilitate collaboration in a group, that does not
already ‘believe’ in collaborative learning or has not had the kind of
eye-opening synergy experience. Probably, to choose a suitable task and make collaboration
a learning objective is a good start for me.

2) So, what
about that paradigm now? Will we just be dependent on coincidently running into
a great collaborative experience? How can we be motivated to try collaborative (online)
learning and expect a true benefit or ‘profit’? – Best practice examples
clearly help. Maybe, ensuring that all teachers experience good collaboration would
encourage them to facilitate collaboration amongst their students. To get this
into more precise instructions will still need some thought. However, a lot of
experiences of ONL could be applied, and I would be optimistic the community
would help. J

Believe in collaboration