Material Detail

With the role of the Internet rapidly increasing in higher education, teachers must search for ways to create meaningful learning experiences for their students. The use of traditional discussion boards to facilitate collaborative problem solving in science and mathematics courses can be problematic with a tendency for discussions to stop once a perceived correct solution has been posted. This paper presents two alternative approaches to collaborative problem-solving that may be more appropriate in such cases. Both methods of facilitation can be called "shared-work" approaches in which students work privately before their work is shared with classmates. One approach, developed by Thomas Banchoff, is an individualized approach in which each student is responsible for constructing his or her own solutions to an assignment in a personal space that is shared with the entire class during a secondary phase. During the secondary phase, the students can add to and finalize their responses while having access to the work of others. A small-groups version of this approach was developed by the author to promote more student-to-student interactions by requiring the students to work in small groups during the second phase.

Disciplines:

• Academic Support Services  / Hybrid and Online Course Development

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