As I embarked on this topic on collaborative learning, I explored and noticed that how the education models or strategies have shifted through the years. During my time as a student, there is very little collaborative learning incorporated into the curriculums as I cam from a very typical and traditional education path in Singapore (primary school –> secondary school –> junior college –> university). The only real instance that I have experience with collaborative learning was in junior college where every students have to take a compulsory subject aptly named “Project Work” during the first year.

I recall we have could not choose our own team members and had some fixed topics that we have to choose from for the team to work on in that year. As it is the first time that all or most of us did such a subject, we needed quite a bit of guidance from our teachers. It was not a typical “study for examination” kind of subject that we are used to. Hence, it is not surprising that many questioned the need for such a subject. Looking back at it now, I can’t say it allowed me to pick up some skills that other subject won’t and hence, nonetheless, formed an integral part of my education experience and journey.

Back to the discussion for the collaborative learning, I thought it was very interesting to see what others have done and how to incorporate it into their courses. While I have not really done it for my course, learning about what people have done and how people have done it actually inspire me to find ways to introduce this to my students. In another of my experience with collaborative learning (this time during my university days), we get to choose our own team members and get to work on project topic that we decided ourselves in this module called “Engineering Innovation and Design“. The experience is quite different from Project Work, and now reflecting on both experiences, I can see the good and bad of two different approaches/setting to collaborative learning as well as the maturity of the students perhaps also played a part in the effectiveness of such learning strategy.

In García-Almeida et al., they described the benefits of using collaborative learning and highlighted one of them as getting the students more proactive in their learning. I agree with them as collaborative learning, in a team setting, often allows some form of motivation from peers. In another study done by England et al., it shows that such learning or teaching style allow students to learn soft skills that are applicable in the real world (i.e. their work environment), which I believe is true and like mentioned previously, some of these cannot be picked up in the more traditional modules.

Now the question for myself is how to I design such a course to impart such skills to my students???

References

Garcia-Almeida et al. (2020), The influence of knowledge recipients’ proactivity on knowledge construction in cooperative learning experiences, Active Learning in Higher Education 21 (1), 79-92

England et al. (2020), Using collaborative learning to develop students’ soft skills, Journal of Education for Business 95 (2), 106-114