When collaboration works

[see: Guzdial 2002]

Courses where collaboration work place a large emphasis on discussion. Might it be sensible then to introduce online collaboration *after* students have become comfortable with using a discussion board. This might be the first step in promoting collaboration (being used to communicating online with your peers) and then move on to a collaborative exercise.

The Guzdial paper mentions Cohen's literature review on collaborative learning: open-ended, ill-structured problems tend to encourage productive collaborative learning. Furthermore when there is more than one answer to a question it is easier to collaborate.

[tag: community]