Collaboration within Multinational Learning Communities

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the investigation of essential features of a multinational virtual community that can promote effective collaboration and research among its members so as to overcome space, time, and language barriers. Specifically, a multinational Virtual Community Collaborative Space for Sciences Education has been formed in the context of the Socrates Comenius 2.1 European Project: “VccSSe – Virtual Community Collaborating Space for Science Education.” In this project, researchers from five European countries (Romania, Spain, Poland, Finland, and Greece) participated in a multinational learning community where blended collaborative learning courses were formed in order to train teachers from these countries in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in their real teaching practices. Within this framework, a number of specific software and pedagogical tools were formed to support collaboration and learning for the teachers and the researchers who participated in this virtual community. After the end of these courses, the teachers were asked to design their own virtual experiments and lesson plans and then to implement them in their classrooms. The analysis of the data shows that the researchers-partners of VccSSe effectively used various collaborative methods to produce the previously mentioned software and pedagogical tools. It has been also shown that teachers who participated in the VccSSe project were encouraged—by the use of the collaborative tools provided and the aforementioned collaborative blended course—to develop interesting virtual experiments and use them in their classrooms. Finally, it is worth noting that students who participated in those classes provided favourable feedback related to the implementation of virtual experiments in their everyday learning experiences.