Developing On-line collaboration

This chapter focuses on developing on-line collaboration. The basic premise is that an effective educational experience involves much more that just delivery of content material. In addition to effective content delivery, a positive educational experience also involves a climate conducive to learning. The recent push for web courses with either little or no face-to-face contact ignores the importance of subtle and cumulative effects of a variety of factors that create a learning environment. It is shown that recent educational research has found that students learn more effectively if they become partners in a cooperative learning environment, but they need the skills to do so. A model describing collaborative group development, instructor behavior, and student readiness for on-line cooperative learning is provided to show how instructors can foster on-line collaboration. The concept of transactional distance is used to describe aspects of the distance learning environment. Specific examples and recommendations are given for decreasing transactional distance and increasing on-line collaboration.