Collaboration in Educational Settings

Nathan Campbell Lisa Doan

Kirill KireyevMalte Winkler

Why Collaboration?

• Why Collaboration?– Teaches valuable “people” skills– Self-empowerment, responsibility– Fosters creativity, self-expression– Synergy of ideas, “symmetry of ignorance”– Cognitive Dissonance Theory

• Why Computer-aided Collaboration?– Helps mediate opinions (everyone is heard)– Easy to organize/visualize information– Distributed

• Space / Time / People– Fun

New usersadopt a

tool to help complete a task.

Frustration overusability and

functionality. Lackof other users and

support adds tofrustration.

Abandonment due to

frustration

Cycle of Abandonment

Different Modes of Collaboration

Design Questions

• Balance online vs. face-to-face– How to integrate?

• Open-ended (wiki) vs structured (WebCT)– Freedom may be messy

• General vs. specific

• Mediation?

• Support flexibility, evolution– Users will use in different ways

Lessons Learned

• Technological artifacts must be accompanied by understanding and willingness to change underlying social practices

• Collaboration requires proper environment– Open-ended projects– Shared goals– Non-competitive environment

• Collaborative skills need to be taught

Project

Enhancing Collaboration Among Students

In Large Lecture Settings

Large Lectures: Challenges

• Students often have questions, but hesitate to ask– Don’t want to interrupt lecture– Shy / self-conscious

• Lecturer’s attention is limited• Difficult to gauge level of student

understanding, interest• Difficult to remember discourse,

reasoning, opinions

Large Lectures: Opportunities

• Peers represent large body of knowledge and opinions– Improve deliberation process

• TAs available to answer questions– As long as not intrusive to the lecture

• Clickers work well, but would be nice to:– Add justification– Persist answers (in context) for later review

• Student want to ask questions– Gain confidence to know they’re not alone

Proposed Solution: SLE

Notes andQuestion Markers

As the Question Marks Increase the ClassConfusion Histogram gives the students, TAs,and the professor a class status

Students have the ability to ask questions that get sent out to all students and TAs that they can discuss and look at the answer provided by each other or the TA. They also have the ability of increase the questions need to be answered

We also have “clicker” capability, but require justifications for every answer.

We also have “clicker” capability, but require justifications for every answer.

Random Justifications are displayed. The students are able to discuss the questions with each other by simply clicking the discuss button