Collaborative and Cooperative Learning

Abstract

The last few years have seen massive changes in how undergraduate and postgraduate courses are delivered. It is now expected that much, or perhaps all, of the course content will be made available online. This change to online Web-based forms of delivery would seem to provide the ideal circumstances for non-traditional methods of teaching and learning to be re-examined. Online collaborative and cooperative learning techniques are not widely practiced in undergraduate tertiary education, despite their many widely recognized advantages – see for example Panitz (2000). However, interest in such techniques is increasing, as evidenced by the biennial Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) conferences and recent books on the topic by Barkley, Cross, & Major (2003) and Roberts (2003, 2004). An examination of the literature suggests that some authors writing about online collaborative learning are actually writing about online cooperative learning, and vice versa. This conflation of terms can make research results hard to assess. It, therefore, seems important to attempt to ascertain the similarities and differences between the two, so that theoretical and empirical research into their application in an online environment can be properly carried out and assessed.