The Effect of Individual and Group Characteristics on Remote Collaboration

Collaborative learning can be an effective instructional technique, but the results of studies of online collaboration are inconsistent. Our hypothesis is that student characteristics and group characteristics account for these inconsistencies. Studies investigating interactions during online collaboration have reported some unpredictable group behaviors. This raises important issues about the use of computer-mediated collaboration tools in educational settings. In this paper, we report the results of a two-week long experiment in which eight non-co-located teams of students each designed a green roof for a university client. The students used a suite of on-line collaboration tools, so we could capture all their exchanges in digital form. We measured many student characteristics including personality type, learning style, and multiple intelligence. We developed a measure of the level of group collaboration and studied the effect of group diversity on the degree of collaboration