Group Online Collaboration For Scholarly Articles Readability and Understandability: SOAR

Challenging scholarly articles are not easy to read and understand by learners. Our previous work shows an innovative learning framework –SOAR (Scholarly Article) validated on a group of learners without research experience on improving their comprehension skill on scholarly articles. In this paper, we present additional result after validating SOAR on novice learners who first time read scholarly articles. SOAR is based on a theory of Brown’s et al, emphasizing the importance of collaborating and sharing educational knowledge, so that various scholarly articles can be understood faster and more easily by students, researchers and academics. It places heavy emphasis on research, its integration and incorporation within learning activities, and on allowing learners to build their research, analytical and critical review skills. It is based on the concept of scholarly articles as the key subject context integrated within courses as part of a test assessment or a tutorial-based activity in an e-learning environment, as an alternative approach for maintaining educational sustainability. In turn, the aim of this framework is to help learners understand scholarly articles by encouraging them to collaborate and discuss challenging issues online with other global learners and, through the appropriate use of a tool for collaboration, to generate inventive and innovative ideas.