This document discusses providing support for small groups in online collaborative learning through the combination of collaboration scripts and online tutoring. Collaboration scripts set instructions for how students should form groups, interact, and solve problems, and have been shown to improve collaboration skills. Online tutoring guides students through a course by supporting cognitive, social, and metacognitive activities without direct teaching. The author questions how collaboration scripts and online tutoring can be combined to provide support for these processes during small group work.

1. A framework for small group support in
online collaborative learning
Aleksandra Lazareva
Department of global
development and planning

2. Supporting online collaborative activities
• Provide certain structures in the learning environment
• Moderate collaborative learning during the process itself

3. Collaboration scripts
• Set of instructions prescribing how students should form
groups, how they should interact and collaborate and how
they should solve the problem
• Strong positive effect on collaboration skills, smaller effect on
domain-specific knowledge acquisition
• Should be supported repeatedly

4. Online tutoring
• Not teaching but guiding through the course designed by the
instructor
• Support content-specific cognitive activities (monitor progress,
provide prompts), social activities (support open and inclusive
learning environment), and meta-cognitive activities (help
students plan and coordinate)
• Amount and degree of intervention
3

5. Question
• How can CSCL scripting and online tutoring be combined to
provide small groups with support for cognitive, meta-
cognitive, and social processes?
4

6. Context
• One-year postgraduate online collaborative learning course
• Online pedagogy
• By February 2017, two cohorts have completed the course
(N=54) and the third cohort (N=24) is currently taking the
course
• International: Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America
• Different educational background
• Small groups (5-6 members)

7. Data
• Student survey of the 2nd cohort administered in the end of fall
semester 2015
• Focus group interview with African participants from the 1st
and 2nd cohorts carried out in the end of spring semester 2016
• Student survey of the 3rd cohort administered at the start of
spring semester 2017
6

8. Technology-mediated learning model (Gupta &
Bostrom, 2009)

9. Thank you very much!
8