Collaborative Learning as a Vehicle for Learning about Collaboration

This paper explores the development and delivery of a Masters course titled ‘Collaboration and ECommerce’. The course examines a variety of issues relating to E-Commerce with the major focus being upon collaborative aspects of web-related business activities. The aim of the course is to lead students to engage in actual collaborative processes and so to provide them with practical experience to support the theoretical aspects of the subject. The paper outlines the issues behind the design of the learning structure that was used to promote both intra-group and inter-group collaborative action. Although the course is currently run in face-to-face mode with no web support it had to be designed in such a way that the learning structures and processes would translate to a web-enabled form for future operation.