Project-based, asynchronous collaborative learning

The value of collaboration as a tool to promote learning is becoming increasingly more evident. Students engaged in collaborative efforts typically retain the information being learned longer by becoming more actively engaged in the learning activity. There is evidence that collaborative activities foster higher-order thinking skills such as analytical reasoning, synthesis, and evaluation. Furthermore, students work in an environment that better prepares them to meet the challenges inherent in succeeding in the workforce. Constructivism in the form of project-based learning has likewise been shown to foster increased retention of material and greater depth of learning. When combined with collaborative assignments, students have demonstrated greater retention and enhanced capability of transferring concepts to practice. Promoting collaboration in a classroom setting is difficult and often resisted by both teachers and students. This difficulty is magnified for courses offered in an online learning environment. Although there are a number of applications available to enable real-time communication, the immediacy and intimacy of person-to-person interaction is difficult to replace. The non-verbal cues that comprise a large part of everyday communication are largely lost through even the richest online environment. As a result, educators are faced with a dilemma: both students and academic institutions are flocking towards courses offered via an asynchronous learning network, but there is no clear understanding of how to foster collaboration, one of the most promising pedagogical tools. Although asynchronous online environments certainly lack the intimacy and immediacy inherent in face-to-face settings and simulated to an extent by synchronous applications, meaningful collaborative assignments are still possible. The proposed paper details a five-step systems approach for fostering project-based, collaborative learning in an asynchronous learning environment. The steps are illustrated with examples from a graduate-level course in multimedia systems in which asynchronous collaboration was a featured assignment.