Training material on designing online collaborative learning activities

Students want new ways to engage and collaborate. Virtual classrooms, smart collaboration tools and online professional development deliver new opportunities to meet learners where they are. Online collaborative learning theory, or OCL, is a form of constructivist teaching that takes the form of instructor-led group learning online. In OCL, students are encouraged to collaboratively solve problems through discourse instead of memorizing correct answers. The teacher plays a crucial role as a facilitator as well as a member of the knowledge community under study.[1]

Gabriela Warren in her article The Benefits of Online Collaboration Tools marks out these  online collaboration benefits:

·      It’s easy to keep track of projects;

·      Team members can be anywhere;

·      Ease of reporting;

·      Actions are done quickly;

·      Documents are all stored in a single place.

Successful online collaboration tool needs to be easy to use and set up. Then, it needs to be secure and to have the features that will fit your purposes - these are different for every team. So if you mainly want to hold online brainstorming sessions, for example, it’s important that the tool you choose has a good whiteboard functionality. Other useful features are the ability to upload documents, a calendar and notifications by e-mail when changes have been made to a document.

Group work. Use online collaborative documents to develop a reflective journal template to track evidences of socio – cultural exchange during learning.

Using free online tools Google Keep (https://www.google.com/keep/) and/or Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com) and/or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com) define template to track social-cultural exchange.