Activity6

There are numerous challenges that must be faced when attempting to utilize collaborative activities in an online course. Conduct an in-depth research of no less than three specific challenges. Analyze the challenges from different perspectives and present potential solutions to the challenges. Use at least three to five outside references in your paper. Be sure to include citations for quotations and paraphrases with references in APA format and style.

**__Challenges in Online Collaborative Learning Activities __** Community-centered learning is a challenge in both online and face-to-face learning modes when trying to accommodate diverse needs of students and teachers. The students need to be motivated to succeed in online courses. Today, we integrate technology in to courses for teaching and learning in face-to-face, online and blended classrooms. Integrating is not just putting technology in to classrooms to deliver instruction such as posting lecture notes or the syllabus online to enhance online learning. It is much more than that. Effective instructional activities must be provided to enhance learning rather than following face-to-face instructional activities for various modes of learning. Integrating technology in learning should bring learners together rather than isolating them, although it allows the learners to learn at different times and in different places.

Several learning theorists have contributed to the advancement of adult learning, and the programs offered at community colleges and online universities provide online courses for students to earn Associates degrees, prepare for a four-year university, or add to their knowledge for career advancement or re-entering the workforce. Ensuring online instructional methodologies are consistent with adult learning theories is considered to be very important in today’s online education (Slovick, 2011). Adult learning theories are important in the online instruction because the instructors need to understand how the students learn so that they can understand what they need to change to be successful in online instruction. Online instruction requires that the instructors understand how the students learn and apply their knowledge in the collaborative learning activities. **Collaborative Based Theories of Learning ** Numerous studies based on the theoretical framework on collaborative learning promote the idea that social interaction within a community fosters stronger engagement and in-depth subject understanding among learners. Theories such as Vygotsky’s (1978) ZPD - Zone of Proximal Development, situated learning (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991), and distributed cognition (Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsch, 2000) cultivate an understanding of learning as a function of socially shared activity. These theories provide the foundation for further development of a perspective that centers upon the learning community (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1988).

The importance of social interaction to learning is reflected in the work of Vygotsky (1978), for example, who argued that each step in the process of a child’s cognitive development begins first at the social level before becoming internalized within the individual. According to Vygotsky’s view, cognitive development results from internalizing socially shared activities. Activity acquires meaning, moreover, within the “system of social behavior” (p. 30). While Vygotsky conceived of the ZPD as pertaining to an individual learner within the context of social interaction, other scholars have broadened this idea. In their study of the ZPD within the context of collaborative learning, Fernandez, Wegerif, Mercer, and Rojas-Drummund (2001) observed the ZPD in student interactions as a collective phenomenon of the group. Brown et al. (1993), furthermore, argued that the ZPD not only includes people, but any artifacts with which people interact. These artifacts might include text materials, reference books, videos, displays, or a computer environment intended to support learning.

 The distributed cognition takes a much more broadly systemic view of thinking and learning that includes interaction among humans and the tools in their learning environment. Gierre and Moffat (2003) explain distributed cognition as the larger mediating system in which a complex cognitive task can be accomplished that no one individual could accomplish alone. According to this view, cognition can be explained as a distributed phenomenon in which learning is mediated by interacting and interdependent elements that include tools, knowledge, interpersonal interactions, and the personal experiences of individuals within the group (Gierre & Moffat, 2003; Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsch, 2000; Pea, 1993). Steketee (2002) discusses the tools in a distributed environment to be viewed as cognitive partners by the human elements of the system. These learning theories promote the view that the most engaging learning environment is a community.

In a college or university setting, learning community engages students more deeply than the traditional methods. For example, students not only feel more connected when learning within a community, but also engage in higher levels of learning, such as sharing multiple perspectives, refining knowledge through the process of debate and argumentation, and taking on more complex learning tasks (Wilson et al., 2004). Sigler (2011) emphasizes that connecting students through community thus enhances student engagement as well as the depth and complexity of their online learning. **Analysis of Online Community of Learners ** Salmon (2004) E-moderating model analysis of online community development presents a more detailed view. The first stage centers on motivation and participants’ developing sense of self-efficacy with the technology, whereas during the second stage online socialization occurs among group members. The third and fourth stages progress to exchange of information followed by analysis and construction of knowledge. During the fifth stage, members of the online community demonstrate meta-cognition. When considered against the backdrop of many other studies demonstrating low participation as well as high drop-out rates in online coursework (Bernard et al., 2004; Sigler, 2011), however, each of these models appears to represent online community development from an idealized point of view. Figure 1: Salmon's five-step model for e-learning. All things in moderation (2004). ||  || Each stage requires students to master certain technical skills (shown above in the Figure.1 at the bottom left of each step). Each stage calls for different e-moderating skills and the “interactivity bar” running along the right of the flight of steps suggests the intensity of interactivity that you can expect between the participants at each stage. In the researcher’s online Java programming classroom that she teaches for, the online students tend to interact only with one or two others in the discussion board forums when the course starts, which relates to stage one of Salmon’s model.
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During the first week, an online discussion board is being set up by the researcher welcoming the students with a note, “Welcome to Java land!” with the intention of acclimatizing students to learn the host language in Java land through online collaboration. Since the nature of the discussion is simply to get students to use the discussion board tool and get familiar with, not much attention being paid to the diversity of the messages during first two weeks. It is more based on the understanding that if someone is not contributing they are at least "lurking" or observing the situation, which gave them an overview of the online communication process. Any off-topic communication that dragged for more than a day gets put off by the researcher in a timely manner. Getting students to talk to each other can be mapped to the first two steps of the E-moderating model. After stage two, the student-student and student-facilitator interaction rises, and the frequency, gradually increases more in stage four when the students have to put together an online web application as a group, although stage five often results in a return to more individual pursuits in working on their individual projects.

Besides undertaking formative exercises, students were required to participate in summative online discussions for their group projects. Students were assigned to their group projects during week five and given discursive questions intended to direct the discussion for their group work. This enacted the steps three and four of the E-moderating model (as shown in the Figure. 1). It was evident that those students who participated in the early discussions were also frequent posters to the group project discussion that contributed in great detail. Some of the posts to the assessed discussion boards were very lengthy and in depth, where students spent time and effort composing their replies. Students had the opportunity to use the "Lava Cafe" forum created by the facilitator where they were encouraged to chat about their general interests. Though it was not counted for grading, this forum helped students to share many views and also helped them to choose their group leads by building healthy teams.

Thus the researcher discusses through E-moderating model (Salmon, 2004), the teaching experiences shared through the Java programming course for her online students, by highlighting the communication being very effective in a collaborative online learning environment. Collaborative learning though it is challenging, it allow students gradually to bond and socialize in groups as the course term progress. By getting acquainted to know their class peers after a few weeks of the online course start date, eases the communication barriers and reduces the fear of posting messages into an online communication for an effective learning environment. The researcher was able to assess from her online course that communication plays a vital role in collaborative learning for student-student and student-facilitator. **Participation ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Participation is one of the greater challenges to building community in computer-aided collaborative environments. One of the most critical challenges to successful participation in online communities is provision of adequate support to the learners, and a moderator or facilitator serves a critical function in addressing this challenge (Li, 2004; Poole, 2000; Vonderwell & Zachariah, 2005). More nearly equal participation including both the instructor and the students, may enhance a sense of community among participants in a virtual learning environment (Griffin, 2007). For example, in a case study on student participation in online discussion, Sigler (2011) found significantly higher participation, in terms of the number of postings in moderated discussions as compared to un-moderated discussions. The facilitator fosters participation through encouraging students to revise their views and revisit topics and issues under discussion, as well as directing students’ attention towards articulating connections between current and previous weekly topics, thus contributing to community-building interchanges among participants and to knowledge construction (Li, 2004). Diaz, Swan, Ice, and Kupczynksi (2010) also concluded as cited in Annand (2011) that online discussions that required problem-solving tasks allowed students to co-create knowledge and developed higher levels of cognitive presence when the group had the appropriate guidance from the instructor.

**<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Communication ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Online instructors face many challenges in designing a plan to create and sustain an online community. Among these is the wide variation in the expectation of learners which includes preconceived concepts of online learning and technology in general. Instructors and students come to online learning with expectations. These expectations dramatically affect learning outcomes (Kanuka, 2008). A shift toward more synchronous communication in online learning has negatively affected some students who value the freedom and independence from time and place restrictions. This freedom is one of the more traditional attractions of online learning. One of the structures of online learning is that students are typically alone in front of a computer at a time of their choosing (Ally, 2008). Physical access is not the major motivation for enrollments in distance education; rather, it is “the temporal freedom that allows students to move through a course of studies at a time and pace of their choice” (Anderson, 2008, p. 52). Being part of a community of learners actually places limits on that freedom. Instructional strategies can be used to enhance students’ engagement or involvement in the collaborative learning process.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Working effectively with the affective domain of students can be a challenge without many visual or verbal cues in an online environment. Today’s tools include thousands of online collaborative sites which form the new generation of online services called Web 2.0. Online communities of learning have different characteristics than face-to-face communities, the most obvious being the method of meeting. In face-to-face courses synchronous meetings dominate. Wang and Newlin (2001) advocated for both synchronous and asynchronous communication in an online course, calling asynchronous communication the “backbone and muscle” and synchronous communication the “heart and hustle” (p.1). Today’s online communities are in a rapid state of flux. There are many new types of communities being formed online including social networking on Facebook, avatar groups in Secondlife, and communities that include educational simulation requiring large scale role play (Dede, 2007).

**<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Evaluation and Assessment ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Another challenge to successful participation in online learning communities is the evaluation and assessment criteria established by the instructor (Jiang & Ting, 2000; Li, 2004; Stephens & Hartmann, 2004; Vonderwell & Zachariah, 2005). In a correlation analysis designed to identify factors affecting students’ perceived learning in online courses, the researcher did a qualitative survey on two different courses that she teaches for, and found that the way students are evaluated directly effects their participation in online discussions and group activities. The researcher found that as an instructor when she assigns a low or no grade-weight to online activities, students tend to not take that discussion seriously and participation was poor. When assigned a grade-weight of 50 points to the weekly online discussion forums with a pair of questions pertaining to the weekly subject topic and specified clearly the requirements for quantity and quality of contributions, students were more strongly motivated to participate actively.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Akyol, Garrison, and Ozden (2009), referencing Garrison and Anderson (2003), considered social presence to be valued critical and “an important antecedent to collaboration and critical discourse because it facilitates achieving cognitive objectives by instigating, sustaining, and supporting critical thinking in a community of learners” (p. 67). The authors further stated that students value social presence as a means to “share ideas, to express views, and to collaborate” (p. 76).

**<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Conclusion ** <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">Learning cooperatively in groups has a positive effect of achievement. Online education can be equally as effective as face-to-face instruction, through effective teacher interaction and the design of effective instructional activities in order to overcome the challenges faced in utilizing collaborative activities. Interactions with students provide instructors with insights to target appropriate support for students. Use of well-designed group activities, such as team projects and written discussions followed with timely feedback, can be incorporated successfully in the online courses to overcome the challenges in online learning environment by achieving higher order cognition through learner-teacher, learner-content and learner-learner interaction. <span style="display: block; font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt; text-align: center;">References <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt; vertical-align: baseline;">Akyol, Z., Garrison, D. R., & Ozden, M. Y. (2009). Online and blended communities <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">of inquiry: Exploring the developmental and perceptional differences. //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">The ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">International review of research in open and distance learning, 10( //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 10pt;">6), 65-83.

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