The impact of an online project-based learning environment with group awareness support on students with different self-regulation levels: An extended-period experiment

Abstract

Group awareness (GA) has drawn much attention in the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) because GA can influence online collaborative learning behavior. Notably, an online environment with different technological supports may have different learning effects on students with different traits. Self-regulation is a crucial personality trait because it substantially affects student learning in an online learning environment. Most importantly, some studies also speculated that context and group awareness can influence an individual with different self-regulation level to have different learning behavior. Thus, this work investigated how GA influence students with different self-regulation (SR) level on collaborative behaviors in an online project-based learning environment. The e-learning environment may also have temporary effects on student learning. Thus, the duration of this experimental intervention of this work was extended (i.e., fourteen weeks in total which separated into two stages). This work developed one online collaboration environments with GA support and one without group awareness (NA) support. The experimental results show that, in the first stage 1 (i.e., from first to seventh week), GA could enhance the significantly higher quantity of personal contributions and peer interactions of both low- and high-SR students than NA could. However, in late stage 2 (weeks 8–14), GA continued to sustain high-SR students but had no apparent effect on low-SR students. Under an online PBL environment, GA seems to have positively temporary effects on low-SR students while GA seems to have positively sustainable effects on high-SR students. In summary, the effects of an online PBL environment with GA support vary by duration (i.e., temporary or sustainable effect) on different SR-level students. Some discussions were also given.