How the trials are performed…

Pedagogical aspects

Four partners from the iCamp consortium will be involved in the validation trials. There will be interesting mix of students with different academic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

First validation trials will focus on exploring the feasibility of Cross-Cultural Collaboration in the context of the iCamp space. Coincidentally, the practical application of the other two conceptual frameworks – Self-Directed Learning and Social Networking – will be studied as well.

Groups of international students will be required to develop a questionnaire (i.e. artefact) with reference to the key concepts “cross-cultural comparisons” and “e-learning”. Given the heterogeneous backgrounds of the students and the objective of promoting self-directed learning, it is desirable to give students leeway to specify the exact scope and title of the questionnaire. While the co-creation of the questionnaire is the common core activity that the students from all four participating institutions (or trial sites) are required to accomplish, the implementation of the questionnaire thus created and subsequent statistical data analyses are optional activities at the discretion of individual facilitators’ needs. However, no strict adherence to it will be imposed. As the first trials are primarily exploratory, flexibility and malleability of the workflow is to be ensured.

As grouping of students is deemed a critical success factor for collaborative learning, it is imperative to identify certain grouping criteria, including gender, age, ICT competence, English proficiency, domain-specific knowledge, and cross-cultural interaction experience. With reference to the Vygotskian concept of zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), it is desirable that abler student participants mix with less able ones in a group. Eight cross-cultural groups with each of them consisting of five students will be formed. Considering some students may not feel easy to communicate in English or with their foreign counterparts, two students from a local site can be paired up to bootstrap their confidence as well as to end some emotional connection to each other during the trial period, thereby sustaining their motivation to be involved in the collaborative work.

The facilitators play a very important role here. They are the ones to guide the students and make suggestions for them. Besides, the site coordinators are going to give local support, especially the technical one and then the iCamp researchers will provide the facilitators with support of different kind.

Technical aspects

A set of so-called minimum technical requirements have been identified, which all the four participating sites can fulfill to a large extent. However, owing to the limited IT infrastructure at students home, the trials will primarily take place in the respective campuses.

Constraints

Formal constraints such as accreditation, time schedules and curriculum are critical contextual factors that have to be taken into account. There is a risk that the whole validation setting fails due to one of these formal constraints. Researchers and practitioners have to work closely on setting up the trials in a favourable way where formal constraints do not interfere with the learning experiment. From a pedagogical perspective, the attitudes and competencies of the facilitators and student participants as well as their willingness for collaboration with peers across Europe are critical influence factors amongst many others. Cultural differences and language problems might be additional hinde

Working plan

The figures below illustrate the working plan for the First Validation Trials. The first one depicts major activities that will occur during the three major phases of the trials, namely preparation, implementation and reporting, whereas second figure depicts data collection methods for different phases of the trial. Noteworthy is that we aim to collect data about the short-term as well as long-term impact of the trials, especially the sustainability of the collaborative relations being established during the trials. Hence, follow-up activities in terms of interviewing some students and the facilitators will be carried out several months after the trials to be ended in December 2006.