Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Learning

Abstract

The presented study was conducted during a graduate course on Digital Collaboration involving theory and practice. The findings presented here deal with one aspect of students’ collaboration; the asynchronous threaded forum with instructional design to support collaborative learning within three communities. Students' inputs consisted of several steps towards a final paper, and of feedback to other students' inputs. The instructional intervention scheme varied for the three communities in adaptation and presentation. The authors report on students' perceptions regarding our design of the threaded forums to support learning. Data from a post-course questionnaire is backed by additional data sources within the course to support interpretations. Findings revealed tradeoffs in design decisions for collaborative learning, and give directions for further research. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for using peer feedback for collaborative learning, for designing different schemes of instructional interventions and for other design decisions and tradeoffs.