Collaboration in Online Courses: Drawing Insight from Learners for Effective Learning Design and Learner Support Services

Teachers set the stage and provide enabling mechanisms to facilitate collaboration in online courses. There are various reasons, backed by learning theories, as to why collaboration among learners is desirable. These theories include the active construction of knowledge as a result of peer-to-peer communication and interaction. It is clear, at least on the part of the teachers, what outcomes they hope to accomplish when they require students to collaborate as part of the directed learning process and the course is typically designed to suit this purpose. Designing activities that will require students to collaborate is easy in a residential or conventional education setting, with the learners located in one physical or geographical space. Collaboration, however, could be a challenge in a distance education setting where students and teachers are physically and geographically separated from one another. This paper describes how distance education students collaborate to fulfil required course activities. Specifically, the paper provides answers to the following questions: (1) How do learners go about collaborating with one another to fulfil course requirements?; (2) What are the issues/challenges learners encounter in the process of doing collaborative work; (3) What are the implications in course design and learner support services framework? Two offerings of a graduate course at the University of the Philippines Open University were studied by doing content analysis of the course guides, students’ posts in the online discussion forums and the personal journals submitted by the students as part of the course requirements. Results show that students made the most use of social media, especially Facebook, to facilitate collaboration. Two major concerns encountered were scheduling/timing when meeting online, given the different time zones of the students and technical concerns because some of the group members still had to learn the use of the software to facilitate online collaboration.The students, however, found the collaboration work highly satisfactory in terms of achieving the learning goals and in building communities for learning support. Recommendations for designing collaboration among learners in distance education courses as well as some implications for learner support services are also discussed.