“Online versus Face-to-face Collaborative Learning: Perceptions of Students and Instructors of Technical Writing for Engineers”

Abstract

Collaborative learning (CL) has become a popular teaching and learning approach in higher education. The sudden transition from normal face-to-face (FTF) to online learning during the spread of COVID-19 has required consideration of one's digital competence to cope with online collaborative learning (OCL). This study investigates the perceptions of undergraduate engineering students and instructors -in a private university in Egypt- of using OCL tools, namely Google Suite or Quip to accomplish their assigned technical writing reports compared to other students who use the traditional FTF approach. The study adopts a quasi-experimental research design in which triangulation is applied for collecting data; the participants are 4 instructors and 133 students, divided into two disproportionate groups: 55 students represent the control group and 78 students represent the experimental treatment group which uses OCL to complete pretest and posttest report writing tasks. This paper focuses on stage one of the study. Two semi-structured questionnaires were distributed to students; the first indicated perceptions of students' digital competence before starting the treatment, while the second assessed their perceptions of CL using either method: FTF CL vs. OCL. Instructors were interviewed about their experience of monitoring student's progress through FTF CL or OCL. Results of the first questionnaire showed that most of students in both groups had adequate digital competence and would prefer FTF collaborative work to the online one. In the second questionnaire, results showed significant differences between FTF CL and OCL groups (p-value=0.01) in which the OCL group perceived “Task completion and effectiveness of work” and “Writing Skills” dimensions higher than the FTF group with mean differences (0.22) and (0.26), respectively. ANOVA test revealed significant differences between the 4 dimensions of CL in only the OCL (F(3, 308)=4.190, p=0.01) and Post HOC test showed that the “writing skills” is the most highly perceived dimension in OCL compared to other ones. In stage two of the study which will be presented in a future research, statistical analysis will be conducted to compare significant differences between the pretest and posttest scores of students' collaborative report writing among FTF CL and OCL groups.