• IDEA Paper No. 38 "Enhancing Learning - and More! - Through Cooperative Learning," Barbara Millis (PDF File) and other resources from/by Barbara Millis, UNR

• "Seven Principles Collection of TLT Ideas: Student-Student Cooperation". Click here.(subscriber material).  To see the first draft of those subscriber materials, click here.

• Using New Technologies to Support Cooperative Learning, Collaborative Services, and Unique Resources

• Motivating Faculty to Employ the Resources of a Virtual Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center

• Managing—and Motivating!—Distance Learning Group Activities

• Cooperative Learning Web-Sites Recommended by Millis

  • IDEA Center/Kansas State U.

  • Index to IDEA papers (40 as of 9/20/2004)

• "Online Collaborative Learning in Higher Education" Central Queensland University - lots of good links to resources

• Study Guides Website:  "Cooperative & Collaborative Learning" - Good guidelines, info AND links to other useful resources

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Barbara Millis, University of Nevada - Reno

Varied examples of online collaboration:

• Online role-playing (e.g., in international negotiation) - ICONS Project

• Examples of collaboration and interaction with materials - from a TLT Group web site on the changing nature of university/college education

• "Can Distance Enhance Quality?" Ehrmann and Collins

• Using online interaction, tutorials and quizzes to a) help students "do the reading" before coming to a face-to-face classrooms, b) provide feedback that helps the faculty member plan what happens in that classroom before the students arrive.

Using Feedback to Improve Online Discussion, Collaboration

• Flashlight tools - items for surveys that faculty and support units can use to spot barriers that inhibit even a few students from full participation

• Evaluating and planning physical and virtual learning spaces - a list of activities that can be key to interaction (and to learning generally) along with examples of physical and virtual facilities that make those activities easier - A TLT Group Resource Site

Primers on collaboration and techniques of facilitation.  Educational research indicates that the principles that relate collaborative activity to learning outcomes apply whether the learning happens on-campus or off-.  The importance of those technologies (the campus is a technology, just as a course management system is) lies in the kinds of learning activities (such as collaboration) that they make easier and richer. So here are some materials about the importance of collaborative learning, and how to facilitate it -- the ideas apply to both physical and virtual learning spaces.

• "Enhancing Learning -- and More -- Through Cooperative Learning," Barbara Millis

• "Facilitation," Andrew Feenberg (facilitating online interaction by a pioneer in the field)

• "Equation of Simple Harmonic Motion," a story about informal collaborative learning

Task to help faculty develop their thinking about collaboration and technology

• List the collaborative activities that would be best for your course (whether or not you use them now.) (e.g., discussion that involves pointing to images? coaching while someone is using tools or a specialized environment to do course work? role plays? working on projects over a period of weeks?)

  • Assume that you had the most appropriate classroom and the best software and communications now available in any educational institution in the world.  Which of those collaborative activities would be best done through asynchronous communication? Which ones would be best done through synchronous communication? Which would be best done face-to-face?

  • Modify your assumptions about technology - you are limited only to classrooms and technology now available through your own institution.  Does that change your judgment?