Reflections of Facilitators

The task set up by the trial was challenging both for the facilitators as well as for students. Although the overall issues and plan of the learning task was set by the project team the detailed plan of the trial had to be agreed between the facilitators. As none of the facilitators had any previous experience in organizing students collaborative learning over the internet the process of planning the experiment was running in parallel with the trial. On the one hand the recommendation for the next trials and/or for the actual practice for collaborative tasks would be to determine the “rules” for the whole process earlier, preferably before the students get involved.

Differences in Student Profiles and Interests

One of the key issues for the success of this kind of learning tasks where students from different sites have to collaborate over the internet is their motivation and willingness to participate as well their relatively even background knowledge relevant for the task. To ensure the latter different strategies were used on different sites: at two sites the task was compulsory part of the running course students were taking, at one voluntary students for the trial were looked for (they got credits for participating) and at one site students of two different courses were given an opportunity to choose this task as one of three required independent assignments for the course. However, for this first trial it turned impossible to ensure that the students would have had comparable academic background – there were students from very different subjects and from bachelor up to doctoral programs. Even though facilitators agreed that all the students would get an introduction to the questionnaire development issues before the trial, the students’ preparation for this kind of task was very uneven, as well as ability to communicate in English and to use electronic tools for cooperation. All this made the cooperation rather ineffective for many groups and in some cases most of the job was done by one group member. Therefore it is suggested that while organizing collaborative tasks for the purpose of learning the students should have more common background and reasonably high level of the common language (English in this case) and computer skills to enable the motivation of the group to communicate and collaborate increase during the learning exercise and not vice versa.

Level of Self-direction

Another issue to discuss is the approach to learning and teaching implemented in this trial. The iCamp project is based on a pedagogical model which focuses on self-directed and self-organized learning, which emphasizes the role of the students in guiding and organizing their ways of learning, while the role of the institution and the teacher is to create the environment and framework which would facilitate and support students’ efforts to construct their knowledge and skills. These issues were discussed among the facilitators but obviously there were some differences in interpretation of how these principles should be implemented within the trial. For some groups there was rather tight control over the whole learning and collaboration process from the facilitator, while some other groups were left with less pressure from the facilitator and provided mainly with information and memos about the aims of the task, expectations and available tools. In the circumstances where students’ preparation and motivation to get involved in this learning exercise was in many cases not very high for the reasons described above, it became obvious that the groups with more guidance and pressure from the facilitator communicated more frequently, used more tools and produced more extensive and high level materials/artifacts as a result of their learning task – thus, were potentially learning more. Even though there may be other factors also explaining the better results for these groups (e.g. in these groups there were involved students with better background knowledge) the rising hypothesis from here is that under the circumstances where students’ inner motivation is not very high and/or some factors limit students’ ability to collaborate effectively, the learning process which is strongly directed and controlled by the teacher will be more effective. Or to put it the other way around, the precondition for effective self-directed and self-organized learning via social networking, and collaboration in a mediated and networked environment across national borders are students’ motivation, common interests and comparable background (including language and computer skills). It can also be suggested that one task for further elaboration is the question of how the role of the facilitator has to be seen and implemented so that it would really be in accordance with the principle of self-directed and self-organized learning.

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