Collaborative Online Learning: A Heterogeneous Phenomenon

This paper investigates the virtual seminar “Education and Socialization in Early Childhood” at the LudwigMaximilians-University, Munich. In this seminar, we focused on the group collaboration, which was evaluated by the students three times over the period of one semester, and on whether this evaluation changed over time. It was assumed that evaluation scores decrease over time as online collaboration is very demanding. Group collaboration was measured with the FAT questionnaire (Kauffeld, 2001) with the four dimensions “goalorientation”, “task-completion”, “cohesion”, and “taking responsibility”. Results show that overall group collaboration is very high, but also very heterogeneous evaluated. While groups 2 and 4 evaluated all dimensions almost on a similar high level, evaluation scores decreased in groups 1 and 3 over time. This is due to the fact that in group 1, one group member left the course without further explication at the third point of time and group 3 showed an inadequate task solving strategy. Furthermore, group size is an essential indicator for group functioning.