Karen Swan, Research Center for Educational Technology, Kent State University
A wide range of theoretical and empirical analyses emphasize the importance of active participation and collaboration among students in promoting the effectiveness of online learning. Collaboration models activity in the workplace, helps students to actively construct knowledge, enhances students' understanding and appreciation of diversity, and may give students a sense...
Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Collaboration entails working together toward a common goal, but what is the common goal we want students to work toward in classes? What kinds of interactions and outcomes do we value as collaboration, and how do we facilitate them? This paper addresses these questions, beginning with an examination of research...
D. R. Garrison, University of Calgary
This paper uses the community of inquiry model to describe the principles of collaboration. The principles describe social and cognitive presence issues associated with the three functions of teaching presence—design, facilitation, and direction. Guidelines are discussed for each of the principles....
Karen Swan, Research Center for Educational Technology, Kent State University
Jia Shen, School of Management, New York Institute of Technology
Starr Roxanne Hiltz, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Assessment can be seen as the engine that drives student course activity, online or off. It is particularly important in encouraging and shaping collaborative activity online. This paper discusses three sorts of online collaborative activity—collaborative discussion, small group collaboration, and collaborative exams. In each of these areas, it provides both...
Shari McCurdy, University of Illinois at Springfield
Ray Schroeder, University of Illinois at Springfield
This paper examines best practices for technology use in online, collaborations between the University of Illinois at Springfield and Chicago State University in class sessions shared across institutional boundaries. We explore the collaborations between these two ethnically and culturally diverse institutions. The University of Illinois at Springfield received two grants...
John Sener, Sener Learning Services
The Quality Matters (QM) project funded by FIPSE and administered by MarylandOnline (MOL) is creating a replicable inter-institutional continuous improvement model to assess, assure, and improve the quality of online courses. Designed to address statewide and national needs for credible quality assurance in online learning, the inter-institutional collaboration is...
Janet C. Moore, The Sloan Consortium
Over the years, insights about ALN collaboration from Sloan-C's annual publications in the quality series, in Effective Practices, and in The Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN), have been useful for refining theoretical and practical knowledge about online education. This summary points to additional resources related to collaboration....
Peter Shea, University at Albany - State University of New York
This paper looks first at some of the often unspoken epistemological, philosophical, and theoretical assumptions that are foundational to student-centered, interactive online pedagogical models. It is argued that these foundational assumptions point to the importance of learning community in the effectiveness of online learning environments. Next, a recent study of...
