Building a Collaborative Environment for Online Courses

Alex Evangelista and Anika Thrower, Health Education

Introduction

Collaboration is a term that is heard often in education. Most instructors know what it is like to be in a class that lacks collaboration or community. It can be isolating, boring and uneventful. So, what is collaboration and how can it improve learning and the classroom environment? Collaborative learning refers to students working together in an attempt to create knowledge and achieve shared goals. It remains one of the most valuable endeavors for enhanced team functioning, with a substantial literature examining the collaborative process and its positive effects on learning, group synergy, performance, and satisfaction with the experience. Educational researchers consider collaboration to occur when there has been mutual agreement within the classroom allowing students to engage in a joined effort to master a concept or work towards solving a central problem (Vassigh et al., 2014). Wang et al. (2017) revealed collaborative learning activities might assist students by providing explanations for their understanding, elaborating their descriptions, and reorganizing their knowledge, thereby improving the comprehension of concepts.

Collaborative Learning during the pandemic

Before the pandemic, institutions of higher learning faced low enrollment and retention especially among minority populations. College administration found it vital to develop strategic plans, enhance campus-wide services and supports in an effort to address enrollment issues while retaining students. In 2020, community colleges experienced the greatest losses, with an overall 18.9% decrease in first-year enrollment from the previous year (Best Colleges, 2023). The 2020 pandemic was especially concerning. Instructors struggled to balance teaching curriculums already in motion, learning new technologies on online platforms, while keeping students engaged. With the best intentions many instructors were ill-prepared to deliver course curriculums through online formats which were designed for in-person instruction. As addressed by Starkey et al., 2021, the most significant issues were: securing broad technological access, instructor training and support, and developing student proficiency to be independent while managing collaborative learning with digital tools. During that delicate time, instructors found collaborative learning to be an especially useful teaching methodology. It allowed students to work together on class assignments and projects. For example, instructors were able to use a virtual functionality within a conferencing platform Zoom called breakout groups. Away from the larger class setting, students were put into smaller groups either randomly or manually. While in these groups’ instructors encouraged projects, or simply a safe environment to share perceptions within an intimate setting.

Regardless of the pandemic requiring higher learning to abruptly utilize online communication formats to deliver distance learning, many students found the experience beneficial. Colleges continued to work diligently to develop and implement services in an effort to keep students engaged and enrolled. Jacobs (2013) argued that distance learning can be just as effective as in-person learning, but different implementation strategies are required of both teacher and the learner.

Ustati and Hassan (2013) identified three themes that cultivated a successful online learning experience. These included two-way communication with instructors and peers, online assistance with technical and academic support, and learners’ autonomy to reflect on their experiences. Teachers must be aware of these factors by actively participating in class discussions, including commenting on posts, asking pertinent questions, diligently reading as much of the students’ written content as possible, and furnishing timely feedback.

Collaborative Learning Research

Forty-four university health education faculty members from six educational intuitions were involved in this study, led by BMCC’s Alex Evangelista, assistant professor in the Health Education department. Three of these schools, including BMCC, were in urban New York City. The other three schools were from suburban areas situated on Long Island, New Jersey, and Williamsburg, Kentucky.

The Collaborative Learning Experiences Questionnaire (CL), first developed by Shonfeld and Weinberger (2018), was the sole vehicle for collecting data throughout this study. The results from this study revealed that teacher attitude functioned as a significant and consistent predictor of instructor willingness to incorporate online collaborative learning in their classroom. Prior training was found to be related to the individual teacher feeling skilled enough to practice online collaboration. Finally, those educators using the combined synchronous and asynchronous formats were more likely to be knowledgeable of and endorse the characteristics of collaborative learning.

Part of the questionnaire included an open-ended question designed to capture additional comments about teaching experiences with online collaborative learning. The question asked the educators to “Tell us about your teaching experiences with online collaborative learning.” Thirty-six of the 44 teachers responded to this question, with eight of these comments being minimal or just “NA.” The remaining 28 were close to equally divided between positive and negative statements. There were 15 positive references to online collaboration stressing aspects of enhanced learning and participation. One instructor stated, “Though I’ve always included collaborative learning in my hybrid courses, I’ve seen significant improvements over the past year. I had the opportunity to participate in a training program that helped me improve my online teaching, including the collaborative learning assignment. I have been able to incorporate steps and strategies to ease student anxiety and help improve individual accountability. I’ve noticed the semester projects have improved.” Thirteen other faculty reported negative experiences, including the lack of a personal connection, uneven workloads, and rewards, as well as difficulty implementing collaboration, especially online. For example, a teacher stated, “The major barrier is that students are not equivalent in their effort, interest, and dedication to a given course as well as in their course assignment(s). This homogenization of effort, interest, academic skills, and intellectual ability renders grading individuals in student workgroups a tenuous task at best. Invariably, student workgroups will have one or more students dissatisfied with their individual grade or undeserving of their individual grade. The solution is to not grade student work-group assignments. However, this removes any incentive for participation or effort in the course task.”

How to Enhance Collaboration

There are some universal ways teachers can start building collaboration in classes quickly and the use of technology has made this process easier. A viable start could be by knowing students’ names and their respective goals. Also, instructors can send out frequent reminders and use early alerts such as Connect2Success. Such activities throughout the semester are deliberate attempts to support students by keeping them on track. Another way to nurture student success is ensuring accessibility to teachers. This encourages students to communicate as often as they desire throughout the semester. Lastly, instructors can develop assignments and activities that allow students to work together. By using some or all of these strategies, students will experience an increased sense of belonging, shared learning process, with a sense of empowerment that only a collaborative environment can provide.

A Collaborative Learning Project

Collaborative learning activities can be framed and integrated in various interactive ways. An example of inquiries explored through a collaborative learning activity as outlined in Table A. This activity is from a Stress Awareness, Understanding, and Management lesson, which tasks students with exploring a variety of stressors. Then they will examine the lives of community members who reside within zip codes. After the scaffolded styled semester long assignment, students present a final project. With this project, honor students are grouped in small cohorts to explore three zip codes of diverse variables, including socioeconomic status, health outcomes, and family dynamics. In the past, the project required students to explore zip codes in Washington State, Seattle (98101), Vancouver (98607), and Cheyney (99004). Zip codes were investigated in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Georgia, and New York. A collaborative learning project of this nature is especially effective when students of different ethnicities work together. This is because, among the students, personal knowingness can merge with newer knowledge. Discoveries facilitate conversation among cohorts and deepen worldwide views together. Leading up to presenting the final project, weekly, the smaller cohorts of students debrief the larger groups. Through this scaffolded styled project, the faculty member provides a space to challenge, affirm, and guide the students toward an enriching final project which is enriched by communal learning.

Table A:

Note: The table demonstrates information students gather within each assigned by zip codes. Utilizing collaborative learning, cohorts are better equipped to make informed assertions regarding community-based stressors.

Discussion

Training remains a crucial issue that must be considered in facilitating faculty development. The open-ended questions in this study recognize this urgency. Here a respondent states, “More ongoing training needed by the institution.” Bustamante (2021) and Starkey et al., 2021 reported in their research requests to develop or promote online and collaboration faculty training. The results of this investigation point to the strong relationship between an instructor’s attitude and their correspondent willingness to implement collaboration. Formalized training must be designed to sensitize the instructor, inform, and emphasize the benefits and methods that will enhance effective collaborative online techniques. Through such a process a better understanding and willingness to create and employ positive and dynamic collaborative experiences will emerge. 

Literature Cited

• Best Colleges (2023). The Pandemic’s Impact on College Enrollment, Retrieved on February 18, 2023, https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/covid19-impact-on-college-enrollment/
• Bustamante, J. (2021, February 06). Distance learning statistics [2021]: Online education trends.
• Huss, J. A., Sela, O., & Eastep, S. (2015). A case study of online instructors and their quest for greater interactivity in their courses: Overcoming the distance in distance education. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 40(4). 71-86.
• Jacobs, P. (2013). The challenges of online courses for the instructor. Research in Higher Education Journal, 21, 1-18. https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/cj_fac/8/
• Shonfeld, M., & Weinberger, Y. (2019). What influences teacher educator’s use of collaborative learning? In M. Shonfeld & D. Gibson (Eds.), Collaborative earning in a Global World. Charlotte: IAP.
• Starkey, L., Shonfeld, M., Prestridge, S., & Cervera, M. G. (2021). Special issue: Covid-19 and the role of technology and pedagogy on school education during a pandemic. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939x.2021.1866838
• Ustati, R., & Hassan, S. S. S. (2013). Distance learning students’ need: Evaluating interactions from Moore’s theory of transactional distance. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Learning, 14(2), 292-304. issn:1302-6488.
• Vassigh S., Newman, W., Behzdan, A., Zhu, Y., Chen, S., & Graham, S. (2014). Collaborative learning in building sciences enabled by augmented reality. American Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture, 2(2), 83-88. https://doi.org/10.12691/ajcea-2-2-5
• Wang, M., Cheng, B., Chen, J., Mercer, N., & Kirschner, P. A. (2017). The use of web-based collaborative concept mapping to support group learning and interaction in an online environment. The Internet and Higher Education, 34, 28-40.
  

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