· How should participation in a collaborative learning community be assessed? How do the varying levels of skill and knowledge students bring to a course affect the instructor's "fair and equitable assessment" of learning? Value in any instructional system comes from assessment; what is assessed in a course or a program is what is valued; what is valued becomes the focus of activity. The link to learning is direct. Instructors signal what knowledge skills and behaviors they believe are most important by assessing them. Students quickly respond by focusing their learning accordingly. The first issue is how various are the kinds and learning goals of online collaboration and so how difficult it is to address the assessment of collaboration generally. Some examples of the diversity of focus among collaborative activities in online environments are the collaborative construction of knowledge bases, the collaborative investigation of scientific phenomenon, group engagement in game-likelearning tasks or simulations, peer review and evaluation of learning products, online peer mentoring, collaborative analysis of case studies , and collaborative discussion groups. Even within these various groupings, one single sort of assessment will not be appropriate because learning goals vary from implementation to implementation. Nachmias, Mioduser, Oren & Ram (2000) distinguished between structured and emergent collaboration schemes.
The second issue is that collaboration is a complex activity which involves both individual and group effort. To encourage collaboration, both aspects must be assessed. Johnson and Johnson (1994) contended that the key to successful cooperative learning is maintaining both individual accountability, in which students are held responsible for their own learning, and positive interdependence, in which students reach their goals if and only if the other students in the learning group also reach theirs. The way to ensure individual accountability and positive interdependence, according to Johnson and Johnson, is to assess both individual and group learning. A simple example of this kind of assessment using summative testing is to give each student a grade based on some combination of their test score and the average score for their group. Another frequently used scheme is to give a common assessment for a group project and have group members rate their peers’ contributions which are then averaged for individual grades.
The third issue is the role of collaborative assessment. Some argue that if collaboration is an essential feature of successful online learning, then assessments as well as activities should be collaboratively designed. Some recent procedures have been described that incorporate student active participation and collaboration into the assessment process itself. Participation and collaboration have been integrated into various phases of collaborative assessment, such as collaborative development of the grading scheme, collaborative question composition , collaborative question answering, collaborative examinations, and peer and self-grading.
Another way to provoke collaboration is to develop rubrics that reward collaboration. Rubrics that reward collaboration must focus on discussion responses. They might, for example, only credit responses that cite and either extend or refute previous postings. Another possibility is to assess postings based on the discussion threads they engender, making thread initiators responsible for sustaining collaborative discussion. This may insure that both individual accountability and group interdependence. An important means for assessing and encouraging collaborative discussion is to have some sort of outcome or product of discussions which is graded.
In collaborative learning, the common goals are educational and generally culminate in the creation of an educational product. Small group collaborative learning has been shown to result in higher achievement, less stress and greater student satisfaction, and greater appreciation for diversity. Some educators suggest that it may be particularly important and well suited to the online environment as a way of incorporating the social aspects of learning into a virtual environment. For example, Hoag and Baldwin (2000) found that students learned more in an online collaborative class than in a face-to-face classroom comparison, but that they also acquired greater experience in teamwork, communication, time management, and technology use.
If a student does not want to network or collaborate in a learning community for an online course, what should the other members of the learning community do? What role should the instructor play? What impact would this have on his or her assessment plan?
Factors affecting levels of learner contribution include but are not limited to 1) lack of common ground, 2) incentives to participate, and 3) usability issues with the Blog engine. In respect to a potential or noted lack of participation of individual learners, a basic motivation to participate in online communities is the ability to gain returns for one's participation. These returns might be motivated by self-interest or might be pro-social where contributions benefit the community. In terms of self-interest, people are motivated to contribute when they see there is value in their contributions and that they are able to receive either a tangible or intangible gain. These gains might include access to useful information and expertise or new insights that might help to refine one's thoughts. A significant motivation to participate is the ability to access knowledge rather than just static information. This issue may become problematic in the Distance Education class community as the size of the class might prove to be a hindrance towards contributions from individual members. The problem with this is that when communities grow too large, the members will have great difficulty in getting the appropriate information that pertains to their needs.
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Pro-social, or community-based behavior, can be explained by a number of theories namely, the potential for generalized reciprocity to take place in the future, the strength of social relationships amongst the parties and peer recognition when one's contributions are made visible. In terms of the class blogs, the amount of pro-social behavior that takes place is dependent on the fact that contributions to the blog are mainly made to fulfill the class requirements. These contributions may have no bearing on each class member's learning outcome and there is no incentive for individuals to go through each other's entries.
Additional resources that highlight collaborative Distance Education literature, webinars, and blogs include:
References
Hoag, A. and Baldwin, T. (2000). Using case method and experts in inter-university electronic learning teams. Educational Technology and Society 3(3), 337–348, 2000.
Johnson, D. W. and Johnson, R. (1994). Joining Together: Group Theory and Group Skills, Fifth Edition. Boston
Nachmias, R., D. Mioduser, A. Oren, and J. Ram (2000). Web-supported emergent-collaboration in higher education courses. Educational Technology & Society 3(3): 94–104, 2000.
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