Experiences in Collaborative Learning

Abstract

Cooperative learning is a paradigm of collaboration aimed to reach a common goal. The trend of using social networks and social media to deliver and exchange knowledge let us believe that collaboration skills must be strongly fostered to empower users to learn together and from each other, particularly in academia, to support the educational challenges of this century. In this paper we discuss the primary needs of a modern educational system and we present the ETCplus project, a model of cooperation which has as primary focus the students’ cooperation in an academic environment. Two distinct experiments in ETCplus project which involved cooperative learning and people from two international universities are discussed. The first experiment describes a system in a free environment that is left to evolve autonomously. The second experiment presents a system in a controlled environment that uses accelerator to speed up the learning process. The process of collaboration was designed on top of a shared smart platform. Post questionnaires gathered the students’ feedback and the metric for the evaluation of the collaboration were also given. The observation shows that cooperative learning produces better results when consonance and resonance are reached. The paper discusses the weakness and the strength of the ETCplus project.

Keywords

• Collaboration
• e-learning
• smart learning models
• community of practice
• cooperation