By Rob Kadel, Ph.D.
Academic Training & Consulting
Pearson eCollege

We hear a lot in the news media, research literature, and at conferences about the power and the value of social learning. Social learning in online courses is going to change the world!

That is hyperbole, of course, but the excitement remains among online educators and consultants like us here at Pearson. Indeed, products such as Pearson’s OpenClass are designed around social and collaborative tools to make the most of group learning.

In Internet time, social learning is nothing new. We have been learning from each other — friends, colleagues, family members, and so on — since the introduction of Web 2.0 tools. Let us take Facebook and Wikipedia as two examples. Facebook launched in February of 2004, and as more and more users came online, we began not only to connect to friends, family, and old flames, but also to share in their experiences. By now, the typical Facebook user knows that John logged a 5-mile run, Maya found a pig that needs a (virtual) home, and Stephanie has a great recipe for spinach-artichoke dip. Sure, these are not exactly the types of “learning” we think about in college courses, but they do constitute learning nonetheless.

Wikipedia was founded in January 2001. (Can you believe it is eleven years old now?) Some academics have a great distaste for an encyclopedia built around the contributions of a virtual community. (Just Google “Wikipedia not reliable” for a litany of blogs — most without any supporting research — that present arguments on the unreliability of Wikipedia.) I am not saying that Wikipedia is the be-all-end-all of research sites; rather it is the start-all, if you will, a place to go to find primary and secondary research sources. It is community collaboration that allows users to make contributions to what are perceived to be “fact.” Certainly, there are users who attempt to slant articles one way or another, and other users who attempt to slant those articles back to an opposing view. However, in 2003, Wikipedia instituted the Arbitration Committee where experts in a relevant field arbitrate between the views of two opposing authors to come to a consensus or compromise on the article.

The idea behind any wiki site is that as more and more users contribute their knowledge in the collaboration of an article, the article eventually reaches parity. Social scientists refer to this as “regression toward the mean,” and the idea that as more and more observations are collected, extreme measures are balanced out and we arrive at what can be considered the most accurate representation of the norm. In short, the more that average folks and scholars contribute to an article, the more likely it is to eventually represent the “truth.”

So, let us get back to the idea of social learning. Wikipedia is a source that — more or less, and for better or for worse — allows a community of learners to reach a common conclusion. In online learning, wikis are joined by blogs, discussion forums, and shared documents, to name a few, that allow for collaborative learning experiences. Now, let us look more broadly at the notion of collaborative learning. Is it effective, and what do we need to keep in mind?

Lester and Perini (2010) describe the potential that social networking can provide for distance learners in the community college system. As these students have little to no connection to the on-ground learning community, Lester and Perini state:

Distance education students can benefit from more meaningful interactions with faculty and fellow students, keep students actively engaging with the campus, and provide more access to campus services, thereby creating a more supportive culture for distance learners (Lester and Perini, 2010, p. 75).

In this sense, we are talking not just about collaborative learning but about fostering a learning community among distance learners, a practice that has demonstrated higher levels of student satisfaction and course completion among online learners (Rovai, 2002).

However, there are some cautions or caveats that online educators must consider. Akoumianakis (2011), for example, demonstrates that “knowing” and “innovative changes of habit” can be achieved through recurrent co-engagement in practice (p. 67, emphasis mine). To extrapolate from this conclusion, learning is not achieved simply through a one-off, token exercise wherein students spend some time collaborating on a task or project. Rather, collaboration must be an ongoing process where students consistently come to agree on what their knowledge should be.

Lastly, Dawson (2010) observed that when students are engaged in self-selecting social learning opportunities online, high-performing students tend to group with other high performers, and vice versa. Further, instructors tend to spend more time with the high-performing students, providing less support to those who need it most. I take away from this observation that when building social learning opportunities — especially in small groups — it is important for the instructor to intermingle students at all levels of proficiency, even if that means simply assigning students to groups at random. Further, the instructor must then engage with all groups equally and provide feedback to all who need it.

This leads me to one final observation. In addition to the instructor being a guiding force in social learning, the tools he or she uses must be seen as just that: tools. That is, students still have to be responsible for their own learning. Instructors can guide, and tools can facilitate. But online instructors should not be blinded by the uniqueness or newness of a tool and integrate it just because it is cool. (I call this SRBS — Shiny Red Button Syndrome.) Bedard-Voorhees (2011) and Johnson (2011) expound on this point, that the tools selected are only the vehicles for instruction and not the instruction itself. Courses still benefit from a clear design strategy even if that design is exploratory in nature. Johnson (2011) also demonstrates that in the activity system that develops with tool use there are always “tensions” (Barab et al., 2003) or “contradictions” (Murphy & Rodriguez-Manzanares, 2008) that must be mediated – i.e., students should not find the technology a barrier to learning. Rather, it should be seamless with their learning activity and engagement.

With those caveats in mind, let us venture forth in social and collaborative learning, with the goals of not only engaging students, but also contributing to their success as well.

References

Akoumianakis, D. (2011). Learning as ‘Knowing’: Towards Retaining and Visualizing Use in Virtual Settings. Educational Technology & Society, 14 (3), 55–68.

Barab, S. A., Evans, M., & Baek, E. (2003). Activity theory as a lens for charactering the participatory unit. In D. Jonassen (Ed.). Handbook on research on communications and educational technology (2nd Ed. pp. 199-214). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bedard-Voorhees, A., Johnson, L.M., & Dobson, P. (2011). Letting them show what they know: Digital assessment strategies. In S. Hirtz and K. Kelly (Eds.). Education for a Digital World 2.0. British Columbia: Province of British Columbia.

Dawson, S. (2010). ‘Seeing’ the learning community: An exploration of the development of a resource for monitoring online student networking. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41 (5), 736—752.

Johnson, L. M. (2011). Inherent contradictions: Wikis, activity systems, classroom community, and instructional designs for online learning (Capella University, Ph.D., 2010). DAI, 71 (11), 3933A. (Accession No. AAI3423815).

Lester, J., & Perini, M. (2010). Potential of social networking sites for distance education student engagement. New Directions For Community Colleges, (150), 67-77.

Murphy, E., & Rodriguez-Manzanares, M. A. (2008). Using activity theory and its principle of contradictions to guide research in educational technology. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24(4), 442-457. Retrieved from http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet24/murphy.pdf

Rovai, A. P. (2002). Building a sense of community at a distance. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 3 (1), 1-16.