Collaborative Project Work Development in a Virtual Environment with Low-Intermediate Undergraduate Colombian Students

Abstract

This paper reports on an exploratory, descriptive, and interpretive study in which the roles of discussion boards, the students, the teacher, and the monitors were explored as they constructed a collaborative class project in a virtual environment. This research was conducted in the virtual program of a Colombian public university. Data were gathered through a questionnaire, recordings of conversations through Skype, and artifacts or samples of students’ participation in the discussion boards. The analysis of the data followed the principles of grounded theory. The main findings suggest that as they were doing project work in a virtual environment, students played the role of team workers, the teacher and monitors played shared roles, and the discussion boards served as a facilitating tool.

Keywords

• Collaborative class project
• discussion boards
• virtual environment