CLAROLINE.NET

Interaction

For Cohen, quoted by Bourgeois and Nizet (1997), a collaborative task is defined as a set of activities divided in different operations or steps and aiming at the realisation of a goal. It should be complex (not easily achievable by one person) and open (different operations or steps are possible) and should request real exchanges between the participants. Furthermore, this influence seems to work rather at the affective level than at the “productive” one. The students need to be supported and to know that someone pays attention to their urges and expectations all the way through the project.

Generally speaking, there is collaboration when a “positive interdependence of goals” is achieved (one will reach his or her goal if everybody succeeds). Competition, in this way, is a “negative interdependence of goals”.

› What can be done ?

•    Choose appropriate tasks (needing really team work)
•    Produce group instructions and shape activities in order to promote interdependence
•    Acknowledge for multiple points of view
•    Give opportunity to exert critical thinking
•    Send feedbacks to students
•    Give time for personal appropriation
•    Find a good “middle point” between flexibility and constraints, between divergent thinking and synthesis
•    Take advantage of the use of writing (in forums)
•    Use properly advantages of synchronous and asynchronous tools

Claroline tools like users, forums, groups, chat, wiki but also agenda, announcements … are tools suitable for these purposes

Productions

Above all, learning is a process but products may not be discarded as important signs of achieved learning. Computers are tools, production tools. This means that a lot of productions may be developed outside the platform by using usual office tools. An important motivation tool is also to develop something of his or her own, to do his work in an open space.

› What can be done ?

•    Produce and recognize new knowledge
•    Give the opportunity to build an object, a writing, a sign … a new knowledge
•    Provide time for publication, communication, sharing of  findings
•    Design activities to evaluate objects with criteria
•    Design activities to elucidate acquired and missing knowledge and competences
•    Highlight new questions, new challenges
•    Make students curious and aware foe a new learning process

Claroline tools like assignments, exercises, forums but also documents, learning path … are tools suitable for these purposes