Achieving successful outcomes in student online collaborative activities

A picture of a university lecture hall. Students are participating in the lecture by raising their hands.

Getting students to collaborate online as part of their studies is often assumed to be a 'good thing' - but why? And if it is a 'good thing', how can we ensure that students are able to benefit from this kind of learning?

'Carefully designed online collaborative learning can be a meaningful way for students to connect with peers, but also a powerful way for them to regulate their own and others' learning, and to develop the skills to regulate collectively
as a group' (MacMahon, Leggett & Carroll, 2020, p. 361).

As an Associate Lecturer at The Open University (OU) in the Faculty of Business and Law (FBL), I tutor on a range of modules that include elements of online collaborative learning, both formative and building towards the summative.

From personal experience, I have found that some students are hampered by not having some of the basic skills necessary, or the confidence needed to engage in such activities. Exploring how we can support and promote better group regulation in such activities is therefore vital to help increase their success, and improve individual and collaborative learning performance as a result.
Nick Boston
Associate Lecturer, Faculty of Business and Law, The Open University

It is also worth thinking for a moment about why students engage in their studies, and what their motivation and expectations might be. Drawing on Meggison’s metaphors of adult learners (1996), based on their previous experience of learning, some students might be described as ‘sleepers’ in the sense that their capacity for learning is undeveloped and they require significant levels of support generally. On the other hand, others may be ‘warriors’ in that they are focussed on very specific learning goals (often not much broader than ‘acquiring a degree’) and struggle to diverge from this or be more flexible in their learning. This means that they may well bring different motivations and/or barriers to collaborative learning. For the ‘sleepers’, it may challenge their confidence in their own abilities, whilst for the ‘warriors’, they may be making choices about whether the collaborative work is useful for them. They may also experience frustration with students less able or willing to participate – why should they do the work for these students?

Focussing perhaps more on those ‘sleepers’, Lai (2021) found that some of the barriers that get in the way of successful collaboration do indeed include limited understanding of how groups interact, poor skills in monitoring project progress, and a lack of negotiation skills. As a result of their research, Lai advocated the introduction of a specific 'Learning managing and sharing module', to help promote and support group regulation. Lai found that those students who received this additional input had improved group learning performance, and also improved individual learning performance as a result.

MacMahon, Leggett & Carroll (2020) also looked at how to support students in online collaboration, and have developed ten student strategies to assist in remote collaborative learning. These were specifically developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as collaborative learning in certain institutions moved online for the first time. The resources include guiding students on how to divide tasks within a group, sharing process, and creating and updating
shared maps.

Returning to the ‘warriors’, how do we convince these students that collaboration activities are worthwhile? Tackling the frustration some students feel with others that they might see as passengers, benefiting unfairly from their own work, it may help to focus on the teamworking skills they might be developing through the activity, particularly around leadership and facilitation. Employability skills include communication and collaboration, but also self-awareness and initiative. So those frustrations could be turned into opportunities to develop these skills – are we highlighting these opportunities in our activities?

So clearly, collaboration doesn't just 'happen'. We cannot expect that designing and giving a collaborative activity to students to do is enough to guarantee learning. We need to provide them with the necessary resources and skills to manage collaborative working effectively, unless we can be confident that these skills will have been acquired previously in their studies. One option is providing specific teaching input on collaboration skills and group regulation, whether that be a stand-alone module as Lai introduced, or preparatory input prior to introduction of such activities within existing modules. Another option is the provision of additional supporting resources, like the ten student strategies created by MacMahon, Leggett & Carroll.

And finally, we need to ‘sell’ the benefits of collaborative working to students, both to those students who find such activities daunting and challenging, but also to those students who may otherwise consider such activities to be a distraction from their personal study goals. Only then can our learning activities achieve the aspiration of improved learning through online collaboration.

References

Lai, C. (2021) ‘Effects of the group‐regulation promotion approach on students’ individual and collaborative learning performance, perceptions of regulation and regulation behaviours in project‐based tasks’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 52(6), pp. 2278–2298. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13138.
MacMahon, S., Leggett, J. and Carroll, A. (2020) ‘Promoting individual and group regulation through social connection: strategies for remote learning’, Information and Learning Sciences, 121(5/6), pp. 353–363. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-04-2020-0101.
Meggison, D. (1996) ‘Planned and emergent learning: consequences for development’, Management Learning, vol. 27, issue 4, pp. 411-28.

Nick Boston

Nick has been an Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Law for 16 years. He has tutored on a wide range of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and has been a Practice Tutor on the Chartered Management Degree Apprenticeship. He has worked on various quality research projects and audits, and is currently working on a SCiLAB funded project to investigate student engagement on the BA (Honours) Business Management degree.

His background includes over twenty years managing not-for-profit organisations, and he continues to provide freelance consultancy and development support in the sector. He is a Fellow of the HEA and obtained his MBA and the MA in Online and Distance Education with
The Open University, as well as an MA in Music.