The Collaborative Affordance Through CGScholar: The Case of Greece

Introduction

The Commission and the Council, in their Report “Education and Training 2010: the success of the Lisbon Strategy hinges on urgent reforms”, focus on the importance of competences’ acquisition by EU citizens. The aim is for each citizen to be able to learn, to work and to fulfill him/herself. This Report indicated that a percentage of 17.2% of European youth under 15 years old does not have the basic competences (E.U, 2004). The term competence is defined as “a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to the context” (E.U., 2006). In many countries, the educational policy aims for the students to acquire and cultivate the so called 21^st century skills. School curriculums, teaching methods and pedagogy, ask from the students to develop skills and competences such as the collaboration, the endurance, the creativity and the innovation along with the civic competence. In general, the modern approach concerning the school learning process promotes many different interpersonal, intercultural and social competences (Tunnin, 2009). Pedagogy refers to a holistic process, a context including five significant components (combination, connoisseurship, content, context, change), usually called as 5 C’s (Paniagua & Istance, 2018).

According το Digital Education Plan 2021-2027 “Resetting education and training for the digital age”, the designed use of digital technologies in teaching and learning offers to students many different learning opportunities, such as the communication, the increased flexibility, the personalization of teaching, interactive and attractive forms of collaboration among students (COM, 2020). At the same time, when digital technologies are used in universities, they contribute to the democratization of education and to the formation of the democratic citizen (Blayone, vanOostveen, Barber,DiGiuseppe, & Childs, 2017).

The CGScholar platform can collect evidence and serve numerous analytic data for a single high school student either for his/her entire school year or for just a class or a week (Cope & Kalantzis, 2013).

Academic institutions use more and more digital technologies so as to created digital learning communities. Some of these communities are more interactive than others. They also allow collaborative and independent learning. Their basic elements are technology, teaching, and academic sentiment interaction (Kai & Zhang, 2020).

Teachers’ role is important, because they are expected to have a substantial knowledge of the subject taught along with a range of skills (Paniagua & Istance, 2018). Pedagogy is both an Art and a Science. It entails a combination of theory knowledge and empirical implementation in the same school context. Teachers are asked to design themselves the educational environments in order to succeed the desired learning outcomes. These outcomes are expressed with the level of skills each student acquires (Tunnin, 2009). In parallel, teachers are developed themselves as professionals, functioning as change agents within their school unit (Fullan, 2006).

In the first chapter, the theoretical background of this study is presented. The course’s instructor took this background into consideration when he designed this teaching activity. More specifically, Vygotsky’ theory is discussed with reference to the collaborative learning, while there is a mention to the learning communities and the transformational learning theory. The second chapter describes how this activity was organized and implemented in the CGScholar platform with the participation of 14 postgraduate students. In the third chapter, there is a critical reflection of the university students who participated in the activity. A thematic analysis of their answers was used. Lastly, the conclusions from this activity’s implementation are presented. It was also discussed the future use of this activity for educators, researchers and designers in an attempt to foster students’ collaboration.