Individual and Collaborative Online Learning – Reasonable Compromise

Abstract

The collaborative attitude to education in general and e-learning in particular has become increasingly popular and productive. It preserves certain learning values connected with social context of learning and new phenomena of networking and using the tools of social media in education. Collaborative learning values include mutual inspiration, crowdsourcing, problem learning, peer learning and the like. More careful and elaborated look is necessary to pinpoint all important constituents of the overall positive account of social learning. One should take into account historical background and theoretical basis for a new wave in collaborative pedagogy. At the same time, we face one of the greatest challenges in modern online learning, especially in its massive edition, including a new wave of MOOCs. It is a challenge of respecting an individual and open choice of learning path, even within more and more uniform massive online courses. One possible way of providing free choice of student’s learning path is to offer more adaptive academic curricula. The purpose of the study was to determine the students’ attitudes toward community and individual online learning to explore their preferences in this regard, and to have them evaluate which of these forms held more promise for the future. In the study, we were also interested in tendencies in the choice of online learning and traditional learning, as well as factors that may influence the direction of these trends. The results showed that there are dichotomies and conflicts between individual and collaborative online learning as far as sets of values are concerned. But the user practice shows that the reconciliation between the two is possible.

Keywords

• online education
• individual online learning path
• collaborative learning
• learning values
• human factor