After having read the articles listed under topic 3 I realized that they implied some news about me as a teacher and instructor.

The good news is that I am on the right way in my teaching practice, or at least it seems to me that I do many things right in terms of creating “learning environment that provides opportunity for interaction and connectedness” (Brindley, Walti, & Blaschke 2009): I make the purpose of collaborative learning clear to the students at the very beginning of my courses and try to encourage the participation and discussion throughout the semester. I formulate tasks as detailed as possible using the handy online-tool Trello that makes it possible to monitor each student’s activity and apply formative assessment methods. I provide the opportunity for learners to form groups based on shared interests. I give feedback on the students’ posts on online-forum as well as on their contributions to the group discussions thus leading them to the resolution. I make sure that time is enough for each task which is confirmed by online-surveys I conduct two times a semester. I try my best in order to establish a sense of community within a group by dedicating the first session to self-presentations, allowing the students to articulate their expectations and needs, but also by creating a friendly non-rivaling atmosphere, where a wide range of diverse opinions, humor and informalities are welcome. Whenever necessary, I intervene to keep discussions on track etc. So everything is supposed to go perfectly, but it does not. And here we come to the bad news.

The bad news is that despite all of these efforts the retention rate in my courses is still very high (2/3 of participants in every semester) and most notably I fail in creating the group cohesion that is according to Garrison (2006) one of the core principles of online (but for sure not only online) collaboration. My failure has its social, institutional and educational reasons other than listed by Capdeferro & Romero (2012) under the sources of students’ frustration. Not the commitment imbalance is an issue but rather a discrepancy of prior knowledge, learning habits and motivation. Our students come from totally different social milieus and have absolutely incompatible educational background, which makes difficult for them even to communicate and understand each other. For many of them learning is merely a non-cognizant recitation of what a teacher or a book says. With no experience of interaction and discussion at the middle school level, the vast majority of our students are not capable of self-directed learning. Very few of them would take responsibility for team work. Unfortunately, the situation is not much different on the high school level either. For many high school teachers it’s still not obvious that “[l]earners are not passive receptacles but are active in their process of knowledge acquisition as they participate in discussions, search for information, and exchange opinions with their peers. Knowledge is co-created and shared among peers, not owned by one particular learner after obtaining it from the course materials or instructor.” (Brindley, Walti, & Blaschke 2009) All this makes my attempts to introduce collaborative learning practices at my university to quite a challenge. So the most accurate description of my current condition would obviously be: pedagogical solitude.