Methodological reflections: designing and understanding computer-supported collaborative learning

Abstract

Learning involves more than just a small group of participants, which makes designing and managing collaborative learning processes in higher education a challenging task. As a result, emerging concerns in current research have pointed increasingly to teacher orchestrated learning processes in naturalistic learning settings. In line with this trend, collaboration scripts for instructional support have been presented as a potential trigger for collaboration. This article presents a qualitative methodology designed to understand collaboration in macro-scripted conditions. The study aimed to highlight the differences and similarities in how the ‘ideal’ script (the particular learning activities that the script is expected to produce) and the ‘actual, realized’ script (i.e. what really happens in the scripted learning setting) were reached by different groups. In practice, this kind of an analytic method will help teachers to support the knowledge construction of different groups.

Keywords:

• qualitative methodologies
• collaborative learning
• distributed learning environment
• collaboration macro-scripts