Collaborative Learning Design
A worked example
Designing collaborative learning activities can be challenging for many reasons including:
learners are diverse and don’t all value collaborative activities
there are different ways to collaborate effectively
But designing for collaboration is important. Personalised learning and other EdTech developments focus on individual learning, individual cognition, individual success. In the workplace there is rarely an instance where success is just individual. We work together in lots of different ways, in teams, in hierarchies, in small start-ups and big corporations, work is more often than not a collective endeavour. So, whether we are designing learning that prepares learners for the workplace, or for learners in the workplace, collaboration is a key consideration.
One way to support collaboration is to allow flexibility in relation to how learners collaborate. A friend of mine was doing an online course which asked her to post her ideas on a discussion board, her immediate response was ‘but they are my ideas’. This is a fair response when learners are graded individually: individual capital is valued in our education systems, and this can be a real challenge if we want to design learning that is collaborative. One way to meet this challenge is to provide flexibility, in terms of how learners collaborate.
We designed a module, for a formal online learning programme - where participants were assessed individually but we wanted them to work collaboratively - using this principle. The module asked professionals to inquire into an aspect of their practice, to identify a ‘professional itch’, something that they wanted to change, and to learn about it by gathering related data and evidence before designing and actioning a small intervention and then reflecting on what they had learnt. Participants were grouped so that in each group there were 3-6 professionals with similar roles but in different workplaces. They were asked to complete the inquiry process and present it in a blog format; each member of the group had their own page and there was a shared front page for each blog. The flexibility came in terms of letting the groups choose how they worked together.
Working together on the same thing
In the first iteration of the module one group worked through all of the activities together. They identified an area of practice that they all wanted to change, gathered the same evidence from each setting, developed an intervention together which was carried out in each workplace, and then reviewed what had happened. This proved to be a rich experience as each workplace was similar in terms of its purpose but different because of different locations and teams. By working through the process together – collaborating in the design of the intervention and identifying relevant evidence etc. – the group learnt about their own workplace and about other workplaces. They shared different ways in which the intervention did and didn’t work and developed a deeper understanding of the factors that impacted its success. They were then able to refine the intervention for continued use.
Working together on different things
Another group choose to focus on the same area of practice, but they developed different interventions. They met and compared their approaches and reviewed the different strengths and weaknesses. This proved to be a rich learning experience because they explored a shared focus from different perspectives, they learnt about different ways to approach a similar problem and came across some shared and some individual challenges. The collaborative element was in their discussions, each constructing a wider knowledge and understanding of the focus of their inquiry than if they had just carried out their individual one. This again helped them refine their interventions moving forward.
Reflecting together
Taking a quite different approach another group did not focus on the same topic. They were interested in different aspects of practice and so had different aspects of practice as their focus, they developed their own interventions and carried them out. They met regularly and discussed the processes involved, how could they best learn about a specific aspect of practice, what was the best evidence to collect, how could they develop an effective intervention? Through shared reflection they acted as each other sounding boards, collaborating in their reflections on the experience. They deepened their understanding of how they could learn in the workplace and what was involved in introducing and actioning an intervention. Again, they were able to use this to refine their intervention and develop it for use after the module had finished.
Working together the groups were able to construct their understanding and deepen their knowledge of practice, and of actioning changes in their workplaces. Digital technology supported them to connect at a distance, so they didn’t need to leave work to get together. Having a choice of media, they could choose what worked for them to work together, how often to meet and what to share. Each learner had ownership of their learning, with collaboration enriching the learning experience. Having an individual space to present their work and a shared space to introduce it (in the blog) meant that the usual focus on individual capital and learning did not hamper the opportunity for collaboration.
AI is rapidly developing in the learning space, bringing with it the potential for personalised learning plans that support individual learning pathways. Thinking about how we can design for collaboration provides a counter to this, it redirects the goal of learning to be collective, and in the workplace developing collective knowledge and understanding is likely to be good for all of us. It is our responsibility to talk back to EdTech, to shape the technology we use and to consider how it aligns with the kind of world we want to see in the future.