Cooperative learning online

Unit 3 looks at specific strategies for promoting cooperative learning online and illustrates how instructional technology can be used to engage students in high levels of interaction. This information will expand the learner’s capacity to incorporate a variety of instructional and assessment strategies. Online discussion seems to be a topic that many faculty want to discuss during the workshop. Specifically, how do you assess your students' participation online and what role does the instructor assume in the discussion?


An online environment is generally thought to be more learner-centred than teacher-centred. For example, researchers have found teachers post fewer messages proportionally than students and dominate discussion much less in an online environment compared to a face-to-face classroom.

In the workshop we examine the following article, Building Learning Communities through Discussion Groups.

This article provides guidance on how a facilitator designs and manages threaded discussion to direct students in achieving the intended learning outcomes. In addition a model for evaluating student's performance and knowledge integration in a discussion forum is also provided.

The forth unit provides faculty with the opportunity to individually reflect on their experiences in order to build upon their prior knowledge of teaching. Unit 5 takes the learning goals selected in unit 2 and aims to help faculty to develop a coordinated assessment and feedback strategy. Faculty describe what instruments they will employ and how frequent the feedback will occur. They also evaluate the pros and cons of their selected assessment instrument and ensure that the instructional strategies identified in the previous unit are consistent with these measures. Further refinements of the design template may be required as a result of this process and reinforces the iterative nature of designing instruction. The sixth unit represents the materialization of the steps in all of the preceding units. Faculty use a storyboard to graphically map out the sequence and series of events in their instructional unit. This activity reinforces the notion that a clearly articulated plan leads to effective learning. The worksheet helps them to design and keep track of the files and events associated with the individual web pages that they will eventually be including in their online course (shows flow and directionality as well as individual page content). The Storyboarding Master Worksheet includes pages of checklists, tables and worksheets to assist them in completing theirr storyboard by refering to the answers they provided in theirr instructional design and assessment templates that they completed previously.