Abstract
The Taxonomy of Collaborative E-learning offers a new conceptual framework for understanding levels of collaboration. This framework can be used to plan, organize, and assess e-learning activities so participants learn to achieve collective outcomes. The Taxonomy of Collaborative E-learning is grounded in the results of a qualitative study that explored an in-depth view of instructors’ perceptions of teaching with online collaborative methods, and descriptive examples of their approaches. Study findings were used to refine and build on the researcher’s original designs for the “Taxonomy of Collaborative Learning.”
Key Terms in this Chapter
E-Learning: An educational activity or course conducted in an electronic learning milieu, using Internet communication technologies for delivery of instruction, curricular materials, and learning activities. In this study, e-learning refers to instructor-lead academic courses that may be offered partially or entirely online.
Teaching with Collaborative Methods: Organizing learning activities and creating an environment where collaborative e-learning occurs, and assessing the success of outcomes.
ICT Literacy: Using digital technology, communications tools, and/or networks to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge society ( ETS, 2003 ).
Collaborative E-Learning: Constructing knowledge, negotiating meanings, and/or solving problems through mutual engagement of two or more learners in a coordinated effort using Internet and electronic communications.
Cooperative Learning: Cooperative learning is a protocol in which the task is, in advance, split into subtasks that the partners solve independently. Collaborative learning describes situations in which two or more subjects build synchronously and interactively a joint solution to some problem ( Dillenbourg & Schneider, 1995 p. 8).
Collaboration: Collaboration is an interactive process that engages two or more participants who work together to achieve outcomes they could not accomplish independently.
Collaborative Learning: A situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together through joint problem solving ( Dillenbourg et al., 1999 ).