When I’m teaching with my colleagues, we often talk about open-ended problems and project-based learning. Both because we have an idea that we can support/challenge the student to develop higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) (Krathwohl, 2002), but also because in engineering work there is most likely a team that share a responsibility to solve a project task.

But taking the perspective of a project team (student group) that wants to fulfill a project goal—in the example of a student group— submit an assignment to get a grade. Such example would not automatically mean that they will have collaborative learning environment within the group. If we define a successful task by grading the final hand-in and not the process, it is possible to do a good job with the report without collaborative learning, just dividing the work, we will have information exchange in the group, but we will not develop new knowledge. In previous studies we have investigated students’ motivation and found that their personal motivation in terms of performance or insight orientation (Cox et al., 2014) will influence how they act/tackle and complete especially open-ended problems. A tendency towards an insight orientation could also help the student or group to create a collaborative learning, because such tendency aims towards creating an understanding for a topic rather than only completing a task.

We talked about The Five Stage Model by Gilly Salmon in our PBL-group, and I like the idea of highlighting that we can’t solve this online learning solely by a technology nor a process, we need both. We tried to differentiate between;

• Collaboration (in work). Aim: Produce a report/deliverable for other people.
• Collaborative learning. Aim: To feedback, evaluate, and improve on your own ideas. Development and learning is personal.

If we link our idea of collaborative learning that would take place from stage 3+ in Salmons model. This will also help us to understand what tools and support is needed to foster knowledge construction and development. We incorporated skills needed as well, and I believe that could relate to the idea of student’s motivation (Cox et al., 2014) as well.

Reflecting on group activities based on own experiences and as a teacher/facilitator the motivation to do more than what is asked for shows our focus/interest in the topic. So how we can foster the collaborative learning environment might be a large question to answer. But understanding the differences between the stages in Salmon´s model, the tendencies of the student’s motivation, the approach you are using in education (Asynchronous vs synchronous for instance), level of interaction with student (giving feedback) are some aspects to consider when develop activities to support the collaborative learning.

Cox, C., Wenngren, J., Holmqvist, J., & Ericson, Å. (2014). Tendencies toward problem-setting and problem-solving: a study of operations derived from motivation strategies. International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, 10(2).

The Five Stage Model by Gilly Salmon. https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html

Krathwohl, D.R. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: an overview. Theory into practice, 41(4).