CSCL and Innovation: In Classrooms, With Teachers, Among School Leaders, In Schools of Education

We expand the notion of CSCL to understand how people can become more innovative. Good learning designs in CSCL can provide opportunities for students to coconstruct ideas leveraging on cognitive diversity, to be creative and to experience the discipline of innovation while at the same time learning curricular disciplinary knowledge. The adoption of CSCL in the classroom necessitates teachers to be innovators that understand and know how to harness the affordances of CSCL tools for effective classroom learning. It also requires teachers to be able to improvise teaching and learning in-situ in the light of dynamic formative feedback from the students’ interactions and outcomes in CSCL interactions. CSCL is also predicated on the necessary socio-cultural conditions in schools created by school leaders to foster a conducive environment for teachers to be willing innovators and to be able to manage the risks they are taking. Yet developing an innovative mindset can start at teacher education providing opportunities for teachers to be reflective of their practices. By studying and expanding CSCL from the innovation perspective, we may shed light on how to address the teacher factor – perhaps the most important factor in translating the various research studies of successful CSCL to impactful real world adoption of these technologies in classroom practices.