Learning through collaboration: A networked approach to online pedagogy

Abstract

This qualitative study explores networked collaborative learning in the context of an online undergraduate education course, analyzing the talk, thinking, and media that students jointly produced during a discussion hosted via video conference. Our work speaks to recent interest in online instruction, particularly in post-secondary institutions, as well as the challenge of making online courses engaging, critical, and inclusive educational spaces. Working from a sociocultural frame on learning and development, we demonstrate how synchronous engagement online with multiple digital technologies facilitated students’ knowledge construction and analysis of assignment content. Additionally, we illustrate how the students and the technologies influenced each other, co-functioning reciprocally as elements within a broader “actor-network”. Human and non-human “actants” worked together, affording small but noteworthy shifts in students’ perspectives and thinking. We offer a definition of networked collaborative learning, positing that it is constituted by the dynamic convergence of actants working toward multiple and competing goals, and we discuss its potential for teaching and learning in online spaces.