Collaboration Process Patterns and Integrated Assessment in E-Learning Environments

Collaboration activities are particularly difficult in e-learning environments, where the intention is to provide students with valuable learning experiences through working in teams and sharing a common goal. These activities are often conducted in an ad hoc manner with lack of proper assessment and control over learning outcomes. In this article, we propose the idea of enhancing the effectiveness of collaborative e-learning practices through structured collaborative e-learning processes and integrated assessment mechanisms. The structuring of collaboration processes is suggested through the application of successful collaboration process patterns, while the integrated assessment is suggested through assessing not just the end learning outcomes, but also the process leading to those learning outcomes. These structured templates are regarded as collaborative e-learning templates (CET) that may be instantiated using common collaboration tools to generate desired collaboration patterns among elearners. Thus, the research objective involves improving the learning outcomes as well as the collaboration process dynamics through novel application of collaboration process patterns and integrated assessment techniques. This research is currently in progress and we are conducting a pilot study to test the feasibility of the proposed ideas.