TEACHING ONLINE THROUGH COLLABORATION, TASK-BASED AND PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING

 

1.      Cooperation and Collaboration

Cooperative or collaborative language learning is linked with the notion of the teacher as facilitator and the autonomy of the learner (Macaro, 1997: 134; Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 192–201).

Accordingto Oxford’s comparison, collaborative learning implies that students are in control of the learning to a greater degree than when they engage in cooperative learning. However, the concept of collaborative learning is also used more loosely: A definition of collaborative learning is when learners are encouraged to achieve common learning goals by working together rather than with the teacher and when they demonstrate that they value and respect each other’s language input.

Then, the teacher’s role becomes one of facilitating these goals. (Macaro, 1997: 134). Panitz (2001) lists the benefits of collaborative learning:

Academic benefits

• Promoting critical thinking skills
• Involving students actively in the learning process
• Improved classroom results  
• Modelling appropriate student problem-solving techniques
• Personalising large lectures
• Motivating students in specific curriculum.

Social benefits

• Developing a social support system for students
• Building diversity understanding among students and staff 
• Establishing a positive atmosphere for modelling and practising cooperation
• Developing learning communities.

Psychological benefits                                                   

• Increasing students’ self-esteem 
• Reducing anxiety  
• Developing positive attitudes towards teachers.

2.      Task-Based Learning

            Task-based learning is a concept which has had a significant impact on language learning and teaching. While there are many different definitions of task (see Johnson, 2003), our focus is on communicative tasks, whose features were initially identified on the basis of the interaction hypothesis (Pica, Kanagy and Falodun, 1993) for face-to-face language learning.

Task features :

• Information exchange required. 
• Two-way information gap.
• Closed outcome.
• Non-familiar task.
• Human/ethical topic.
• Narrative discourse (vs. description/expository writing).
• Context-free, involving detailed information.

Psycholinguistic definition of task :

•  Meaning is primary;
• There is some communication problem to solve;
• There is some sort of relationship to comparable real-world activities;
• Task completion has some priority;
• The assessment of the task is in terms of outcome.

Sociocollaborative tasks in CMCL

• Provide ample opportunities for differing perspectives and opinions, for controversy, disagreement, resolution, and consensus building;
•  Motivate active participation and interaction by having no one single answer or process to employ in accomplishing them;
• Offer some form of problem-solving (something for which computers are particularly well suited);
• Designate roles for individual learners and teams to take on as they engage in these processes, helping situate learners within a community of participants; and include a motivated awareness of the forms and functions of language used.

3.      Problem-Based Learning

A further way of fostering collaboration and possibly empowering learners is through problem-based learning (PBL), which Oliver (2000) describes as characterised by a constructivist framework, one that ‘encourages active construction of knowledge through personal inquiry, the use of problems to form disequilibrium and subsequent accommodating inquiry, as well as social negotiation and work with peers’ (2000: 6).

Technology can provide a context for problem-based language learning (Tella, 1999: 114). Virtual worlds, for example, can offer rich, multimodal environments for engaging in more complex PBL tasks; written CMC affords a more reflective approach to discussions and can thus help students critically to analyse a set problem.

What computer-mediated PBL settings seem to provide are opportunities for this sort of extended, reflective commentary. These are opportunities that emerge due largely to the fact that the medium involved allows a single speaker/writer to hold the floor for as long as he/she likes and by the fact that one is not under the time constraints that characterize face-to-face verbal interaction. In other words, some crucial new properties of social communication – and presumably mental processes as well – have arisen with the use of this new form of mediation.

Reference:

Lamy, Marie-Noelle and Hampel, Regine. 2007. Online Communication in Language Learning and Teaching : Teaching online throught collaboration, task-based and problem-based learning. Australia: Palgrave macmillan