Interaction Between Students

Summary

Student learning is enhanced through online peer learning activities aligned with the subject outcomes and actively facilitated by an online teacher. These activities may be conducted synchronously or asynchronously and student participation and learning benefits are highest when they support the completion of assessment tasks. This element supports enhanced learner-learner engagement.

Rationale

In face to face learning contexts studies going back to the 1980s have consistently found that well designed cooperative and collaborative learning strategies can lead to substantial learning benefits in both school and university contexts (Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1998; Slavin, 1996; Hattie, 2008). One of the key benefits of such approaches is the way in which they support students in obtaining regular and timely feedback from their peers as they construct and articulate their own personal representation of the ideas and concepts within a subject. While years of empirical research have demonstrated the learning benefits of one-to-one tutoring with individual feedback for students as consistently the most effective teaching strategy with the highest effect size in terms of student achievement (Bloom, 1984), cooperative learning and peer teaching strategies have been repeatedly found to be the most effective alternatives (see for example Fuchs et al, 1997; Hattie, 2008). In a higher education context where individual teacher support is always going to be limited, the latter is clearly more feasible (Boud, Cohen & Sampson, 2014).

In a distance education and online learning context, the importance of interaction between students has been advocated by a number of seminal authors (e.g. Moore, 1989) and has been a key element of seminal models (e.g. Garrison’s Community of Inquiry Model, Garrison, Anderson & Archer, 1999). Kreijns et al. (2002) suggest that social interaction facilitated by computer supported cooperative learning has the capacity to encourage shared understanding, critical thinking and the social construction of knowledge. In a meta analysis of 74 studies comparing examples of distance education and online learning which included and did not include interaction between students, those including interaction between students were found to have a significant positive impact on learning achievement (Bernard et al., 2009).

Aside from the well documented effectiveness of peer and cooperative learning strategies for achieving a broad range of subject learning outcomes, such strategies can also contribute to the achievement of more generic outcomes relating to collaborative work. At CSU, skills such as “teamwork”, “collegial practice” and “practice in teams and in partnership with other people” are key elements of the Professional Practice Graduate Learning Outcomes (GLO) expected to be achieved by all undergraduate students. The use of online platforms to house collaborative activities also supports the development of capabilities expected within Digital Literacy GLOs such as “effectively communicate and collaborate using digital tools environments and social media to synthesise create, integrate and share information in multimodal contexts”. See the CSU Graduate Learning Outcomes.

Interactive learning activities may be conducted synchronously or asynchronously. Early online learning designs tended to allow only asynchronous communication or synchronous communication restricted to text chat due to the bandwidth needed for video or audio conferencing. More recently, widespread availability of broadband networks have led to video conferencing tools such as Skype becoming ubiquitous, and have also made the use of synchronous web conferencing tools such as Adobe Connect much more feasible. Despite the removal of some of the technical barriers to synchronous online communication, it is important that the relative strengths and weaknesses of each are considered (see, for example, Hrastinski, 2008), including the environment differences within text-based, audio-based and video-based communications (Hrastinski et al 2010).

While peer learning activities are important in addressing online students’ sense of isolation, it is important to remember that the need for flexibility is one of the key reasons for choosing to study online or via distance (see, for example, Rush, 2014), and so there are arguments for using asynchronous communication tools over synchronous, or at least allowing a combination in order to ensure that the inclusion of these activities does not impact negatively on student flexibility. In some situations online asynchronous communication can be superior even to face-to-face communication because asynchronous written communication can provide a better site for reflective and precise communication than the “spontaneous and fleeting” site of real-time verbal communication (Garrison, 2000b, p. 10). Importantly, Bernard and Rubalcava (2000) demonstrate the importance of carefully considering the learner characteristics and the learning context in the design of online collaborative learning activities if the potential benefits are to be realised.

Consistent with Biggs’ (1996) notion of constructive alignment it is well known that student participation and consequently learning benefits are highest when collaborative and cooperative learning activities support the completion of assessment tasks. Further, the importance of designing learning activities incorporating structured opportunities for students to interact and collaborate, rather than assuming that incidental interaction between students will lead to the same benefits is also well established. Borokhovski et al. (2012), for example, describe a meta analysis of designed versus incidental online student–student interaction finding clear benefits for designed interaction. Cooperative learning research over many years has also demonstrated that unstructured group work is inferior to designs which ensure individual and group accountability along with positive interdependence (see Putnam, 1998, Slavin, 1991).

Strategies

The following paragraphs describe some more specific examples of interactive learning activities and strategies for supporting them.

Online discussions - Synchronous Discussions & Asynchronous Discussions building on focus questions within subject materials can support students to share their experiences, knowledge and perspectives.

Peer teaching - Peer teaching activities where students support the learning of their fellow students can be valuable to both of the students involved.

Collaborative group projects - Collaborative learning tasks require students to work together towards the creation of learning products and authentic professional artefacts. Within this collaborative practice students engage in deep conceptual and professional dialogue with their peers. Collaborative Group Projects can be valuable both in terms of the way in which the learning of the group of students is supported as well as for developing important graduate outcomes relating to collaboration and group work.

Online reflective journals - The benefits of reflection on learning experiences both during and after professional practice have been well documented over many years (see, for example, Schon, 1987; Brockbank & McGill, 2007). Traditionally when students have been required to record their thoughts and reflections, this has been done as a personal journal or a personal piece of reflective writing (see, for example, Stoughton, 2007). More recently, however, a number of benefits of online reflective journals or blogs have been identified, including the following:

• Allowing students’ reflections to be read by their peers and lecturers may encourage them to take more time to think through their postings, which consequently may lead to more detailed posts and a deeper level of reflection (J. Farmer, 2004; Stiler & Philleo, 2003).
• The recording of the date and time of each posting may encourage students to post more regular reflections especially when regular reflections are part of an assessment requirement (Hourigan & Murray, 2010).
• Reading other students’ postings and comments will provide students with access to a much broader range of perspectives and experiences, and posting comments on their peers’ postings may result in further reflection on their own approaches (Churchill, 2009).
• The sharing of experiences may help students to empathise with the experience of others and develop a sense of community among students (B. Farmer et al., 2007; McLoughlin & Lee, 2010; Yang, 2009).
• The ability to include video and audio reflections can be advantageous both in terms of convenience but also in terms of the potential for richer more natural reflective postings (Bennett, et al., 2012; Deng & Yuen, 2011) .
• Interaction with others (peers and instructors) is a highly important variable in successful learning experiences within the online learning environment, particularly when coupled with the need for students to achieve self-regulation between their own knowledge/experiences and the content of a subject (Cho & Kim, 2013).
• Reflective practice that assists in assembling knowledge and experience in meaningful ways can be facilitated by the use of an ePortfolio, and may facilitate independent learning, development of identity, a sense of empowerment, greater awareness of self, and promote active engagement in future oriented professional practice (Rowley & Munday, 2014).

Drawing together findings from a number of studies, the following are some key recommendations with regard to the use of online reflective journals:

• In addition to providing technical training and practice in the use of the software, community-building activities and activities designed to promote the value of, and develop skills in, peer support and critical reflection should be provided prior to undertaking the online journal activity (Le Cornu, 2005).
• Making an online journaling activity assessable is likely to result in engagement with the activity by a much greater proportion of students, but can lead to negative reactions from some students and potentially less honest reflections (Dalgarno, Reupert & Bishop, 2014).
• Making clear the purpose of the activity and its alignment with the intended outcomes of the subject can be another way to encourage participation and depth of engagement (Divitini et al., 2005)
• When designing an online reflective activity to be undertaken by students while on professional or clinical placement, it is important to consider the other demands being placed on students during the placement (Dalgarno, Reupert & Bishop, 2014).
• Regular participation in the online community by faculty staff is important, but the focus of postings should be on questioning and commenting to facilitate deep reflection and to encourage peer support rather than to provide answers as an ‘expert’ in the discipline (McLoughlin & Lee, 2010; Top, Yukselturk, & Inan, 2010).

Cooperative learning - Cooperative learning provides a structure through which students are required to undertake complementary learning activities which collectively lead to the achievement of shared learning goals. Students take responsibility for engaging with specific ideas and content and then share their developing understandings with the group. Cooperative learning activities can also be embedded within broader problem-based learning activities.

Co-creation - Co-creation of authentic learning products can involve participatory learning activities requiring students to contribute together to produce a shared artefact or body of work through collaboration via synchronous or asynchronous communication tools and/or collaborative authoring tools.