 Good day. For this session, we'll be discussing collaborative learning, its rationale, the types, the collaborative learning activity guide, and the teacher's role in collaborative learning. Collaborative learning is one of the more established strategies to promote peer-to-peer and active learning. It is an umbrella term for variety of educational approaches involving joint intellectual effort by students or students and teachers together. This is done by assigning students to work in groups of two or more as they mutually search for understanding solutions, meanings, or creating a product. Collaborative learning is based on the idea that learning is a social activity and it is through talking to each other that learning comes about. What are the benefits of collaborative learning? First, it promotes critical thinking and self-reflection skills on the part of the learners. Since students work in teams, they have the opportunity to identify and correct misconceptions about the topics. They are also less isolated, so they have better learning experience and ultimately greater academic achievement. And it promotes teamwork skills like in terms of communication, negotiation, and conflict resolution. Now, what are the benefits of incorporating online tools in collaborative learning? First, it promotes a diverse student cohort. Learners are able to collaborate with learners from different countries, background cities using different online communication tools. Since there is asynchronous communication in online teaching and learning, there is increased flexibility in terms of the time and pace by which learners would contribute to the activity. The web also records the interactions of the students in collaborative learning and this promotes transparency and accountability. Online tools also allows access to the differently abled and to those who would not normally participate in the class and it facilitates peer review, assessment, and moderation. There is a wide range of collaborative learning activities but will focus our discussion on three, cooperative, problem-based, and project-based. Cooperative learning is the use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other's learning. Compared to the two, it is more structured. It emphasizes the development of interpersonal skills which it considers as important as the learning itself and this is done by assigning roles within each small group like in the case of a group, somebody would be assigned as a recorder, a participation encourager, or a summarizer. Let's take an example. In the course of the time teaching on organizational structural relations and processes, I want my students to understand the relationship between individual values and organizational culture. So what I did was to ask my students to do a group case analysis of a story called the Alligator River story. They were asked to evaluate the characters in terms of how disgusting they are and to justify their answers and also to reflect on the exercise in surfacing values. For the procedure, first they were asked to do an individual ranking of the characters, then the members of the class were grouped. Each group ranked the characters in terms of how disgusting they are to them. They wrote the group analysis and posted the group report on the online discussion board. The main online resources provided were the Alligator River story which is available online and the online discussion board and in terms of assessment, there was a peer evaluation on member participation and the teacher evaluation on reflection. The second type is called problem-based learning. This is a collaborative student-centered approach to learning in which students learn about the subject by working in groups to solve an open-ended problem. In problem-based learning, we usually start with a presentation of an ill-structured problem situation. This is basically a narrative which is presented in an open-ended or messy manner to simulate real-life situation. Then the students are asked to define the problem or to formulate the problem statement. They then appraise the situation in terms of what they already know about the problem and what they still need to know. They generate the possible solutions and they share their findings and solutions. Let's consider another example. The case study is one of the most common problem-based learning activities. In a course, the time teaching on the ethical, legal, and social issues in the information age I want my student to understand the issues surrounding cybercrime. So I asked them to do a group case study by analyzing online cases on cyberbullying, plagiarism, social accuracy, hate speech, and also to promote solutions to problems presented in the cases. This was how the group case study was done. First, the cases were assigned to the different groups. The groups then analyzed the case. The groups posted their analysis of the case on the discussion board and they were asked to post reactions to the case analysis done by the other groups. Each group also facilitated the online discussion on their own topic. And then they did a peer-group evaluation of how the other groups facilitated the online discussion. The online resources provided came in the form of online cases and discussion board. Now in terms of assessment, there was peer evaluation at the quality of the facilitation done by the other groups and teacher evaluation of the case analysis and the suggested solutions done by each group. The third type is called project-based learning. This involves work in groups to solve challenging problems that are authentic, curriculum-based, and often interdisciplinary. This may use scenarios but often involve real-world situations. Since it involves real-life situations, project-based learning activities have an extended timeframe, requires investigation and research, collaboration, and construction of a product or performance of a consequential task. A good example of a project-based learning activity is WebQuest. WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from the resources on the internet. Let's take another example. Let's look at a WebQuest on the climate change and its effects on local agriculture. The task of the group is to analyze the effects of climate change and local agriculture by producing a video documentary showing the effects of El Nino in a municipality and writing a report on how to mitigate the effects of climate change in the said community. Here is the process. First, the group members need to interview the local farmers, the municipal agricultural officer and municipal environmental and natural resources officer, and the fresh produce vendors in the market. They have to gather data on harvest and prices, produce a video documentary, write a report, and send the outputs of the group. The online resources provided were basically online articles on climate change and agriculture. In terms of assessment, there were breaks for quality of the documentary in terms of issues covered as well as the technical values, participation from the team members and in terms of the quality of the recommendations made by the group. To facilitate the collaborative learning activity, we as teachers must provide tools for collaboration for our students. Now, there are a number of online learning tools depending on the collaborative task. For synchronous communication, we have video conferencing and chats and instant messaging. For asynchronous communication, we have discussion boards and email. For collaborative writing, we can make use of shared writing and drawing systems and wikis and for collaborative multimedia production, we can make use of multimedia and web authoring tools, slides and blog. For file sharing, we have document and image sharing and video sharing facility and for group presentation, it can be done either live stream or recorded. Collaboration is a complicated activity in itself. So we need to provide guidelines on how our learners will go about doing the activity. This comes in the form of the learning activity guide. A learning activity guide should tell the students the task or what needs to be done, the procedure how the task should be done, the resources, what resources and tools will be employed to do the task, the participants who will participate in the task and what the roles are and the assessment performance of the task will be evaluated if applicable. Regardless of the type of collaborative learning activity that you will require students, a teacher plays an important role in facilitating these online collaborative learning activities. First, a teacher has to identify the learning objectives where the collaborative learning is most effective. The teacher needs to determine at which point this collaborative learning will be done in the curriculum or in the course outline. The teacher must create spaces or means for collaboration. He or she must create the means for synchronous and asynchronous communication. The teacher should create activities that would promote collaboration, activities that encourages discussion rather than memorization. He or she should model the development of collaborative skills by exhibiting the desired communication behaviors, behaviors that promote discussion and cooperation. The teacher must facilitate the online collaboration by providing collaboration protocols, rubrics for the collaborative task, and clarifying the roles of the teacher and the students in the collaborative activity. Lastly, the teacher must provide feedback on the students' behavior and outputs. From this session, we have learned that collaborative learning provides pedagogical and social benefits. Online tools can help collaborative learning more efficient and transparent, and you can choose from a range of collaborative learning activities depending on your learning aim. Regardless, the teacher's facilitation skills is crucial to the success of collaborative learning. Thank you.