Epic Think Tank: Collaboration and e-learning
Part 2: What types of learners, situations and subjects suit
online collaborative learning?
Epic Think Tanks take place over dinner, prompting the observation
from one panel member that, in his experience, the subjects that
rarely work well for collaborative learning - coincidentally or
otherwise - were the same three traditionally supposed to make bad
subjects for dinner conversation, namely sex, politics and religion.
From the market perspective, the subjects that have achieved positive
success are business management, health, law and environment - to
which could be added war studies (both as a professional study and
as a leisure interest).
In an educational context, economics, biology, history, physics
and computer science were cited.
As to the synchronous/asynchronous divide in collaboration - bearing
in mind that it had been strongly stated at the outset that 'we
should not be in the business of dichotomies' - studies of virtual
classroom sessions have shown the medium to be completely subject-independent.
The implication is that no particular subject would work better
as an asynchronous than as a synchronous collaboration, and vice
versa, whatever their inherent strengths or weaknesses as media.
However it was suggested that the synchronous form tends to emphasise
cultural differences where the group has a supranational or even
global membership, and that these are more easily managed asynchronously.
This led on to a consideration of whether there is an optimum numbers
of learners whose needs can be effectively catered for by an online
collaborative group. The issue here is taking advantage of the greater
scalability offered by e-learning, without compromising quality.
Groups of 1,000 are by no means unusual in the United States, but
this was felt by one panellist at least to be far too anonymous:
good online collaboration depends heavily on trust, and 1,000 people
is a lot of people to trust!
The example of KGB cells was brought up in this regard, which were
generally composed of ten to twelve members (this would also cover
football teams, cricket elevens and many other sporting team sizes).
Away from the issue of peer trust, a limit might be set by the number
of online learners who can be effectively mentored by a single individual.
Clive Shepherd
was quoted as saying that he felt could effectively mentor up to
60 people online.
In a sense, this brings us back to point 5 on the previous page, about
the level and type of tutor support varying with the tasks pursued
and the profile of the group concerned. However, it has also become
clear that the depth of collaboration required from the learners who
are performing these tasks should also be a factor in determining
group size. The exigencies of collaboration, it was felt, will continually
trip up those whose planning is too supply-driven, too 'top-down'.
Collaboration is all about 'the lateral view'.
This is a perspective that should also come into the consideration
of resourcing collaborative e-learning - i.e. what skillsets and
knowledge are needed for the mentoring/tutoring role?
An example was given from an open learning centre at a UK university,
which was initially unstaffed. A receptionist from another department,
with no subject knowledge whatsoever, was placed in the centre to
help learners find what they were looking for. Attendance numbers
in the centre 'shot up'.
The perception of the panel was that well-motivated learners are
generally smarter than we give them credit for in determining their
own learning needs, and so we tend to over-estimate the amount of
knowledge and authority that is required from the mentoring role.
A distinction was drawn between tutors - SMEs who might be
experts in their fields - and mentors who primarily facilitate
and manage the needs of self-directed learners, for whom much lower
levels of specific subject knowledge are acceptable.
It was suggested that education as a whole could benefit from leveraging
its best minds more effectively and employing a two-tier system,
as above.
This touched on a contentious issue. There is a degree of low-level
panic in corporate training departments and academia alike about
the future implications of e-learning for job roles and career prospects.
Perhaps advisedly so: the rise of network technologies has been
widely visioned as a further, intensifying step in a process which
began with Adam Smith and his pin factory example (where he describes
the 'division of labour' into discrete processes). Now not only
manual but now also 'knowledge workers' are, notionally, subject
to a breaking down of roles and activities into component parts
according to market forces.
The business of putting learning online changes all its structural
models. While in the case of content, the opportunity is chiefly
to do with scale - i.e. leveraging SME excellence - the discussion
above has shown that there may well be limits to the scalability
of collaborative e-learning. In the case of the latter, the more
important issue may well prove to be in this radically new division
of labour, and a consequent rewriting of traditional job roles and
disruption of the professional career structures, something we are
seeing already in corporate training departments.
Having arrived at this point, the discussion was poised to address
the question of what exactly should be the balance between collaboration
and content in e-learning.
Next>>
Background
Part 1 What works and what doesn't?
Part 3 Collaboration in the blend
Afterword
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