 need to learn something complex or solve challenging problems, a very natural reaction for many of us is to discuss it with someone and we do this whether we are students or professionals, what happens when we collaboratively learn and do problem solving is that it allows us to go into deeper levels of reasoning, it allows us to gain new perspectives, higher responsibilities and also gain higher motivation to be focused on the task. This holds in an e-learning context also, before we go ahead and design collaborative learning activities in an e-learning task, let us pause at a reflection spot. If you have taken a MOOC or an online course before, list two ways to where you did collaborative activities in the online course, you may have worked with other course participants. If you have not taken an online course before and this is your first course, you can also think of some collaborative activities that you may have done in the past couple of weeks within this course itself or think of two ways where it helped you to learn along with others in a face-to-face course or a workshop like a traditional classroom setting or maybe just an interactive face-to-face workshop, when you are done please resume. In an e-learning setting or such as a MOOC or online course, you may have experienced collaborative activities involving wikis, you may have posted on a discussion board or a chat forum, you may have been asked to review something that your peers may have uploaded. Similarly, in a face-to-face setting, you would have experienced group discussions or debates, perhaps some structured learning activities, structured pure learning activities such as collaborative problem solving, jigsaw, think pair share and so on. So, these are a variety of activities which involve learning along with somebody else that can be done in different contexts. The idea of collaboration is that learners work together to achieve a common purpose. Peer learning involves the acquisition of skills and knowledge achieved through interaction with others. What is important to recognize here is that collaboration is a viable method for creating individual meaning for constructing one's own interaction while learning along with peers. It is not, collaboration, collaborative learning or pure learning is not merely a means of acquiring information from each other. Several research studies and a lot of learning theories have shown the importance of collaboration and pure learning and again this is across a variety of contexts. It starts with the idea that the social interactions that are built into a learning environment provides support for individual learning. Such group interactions facilitate active learning, sharing of knowledge, promotes skills such as articulation, collaboration and communication. It also establishes a healthy interaction between the students and the instructors within a particular course and finally collaboration and pure learning leads to a broader understanding of diverse perspectives and again we know how the diversity of ideas, the various perspectives can enrich one's own learning. I think we are all convinced and we know from our own experience the importance of collaborative and pure learning but how do we implement it? How do we operationalize it in an e-learning context? So what we will do now is to look at a few strategies and collaborative tools that will help us design collaborative learning activities for our own e-learning context. One of the most common strategies that facilitates and promotes pure learning and is a discussion forum. Now you would have seen discussion forums in a variety of websites on learning management systems or in online courses and many such different places. Now it is not sufficient to simply make available a discussion forum and tell our learners to go and discuss or even to go and discuss about a topic because again what is well known is that very few people actually go ahead and in fact participate in the forum unless there is something a little extra. So one way to encourage to improve the participation in discussion forums is to include a focus question to incentivize people to go and participate. What we have done in this course which you would be familiar with by now is are the learning experience interaction activities, LSI activities which begin with a focus question related to your own personal experience and you had to come and first share your experience share your opinions with others and then the focus question asked you to go and look at other people's experiences and comment upon them. Closing this activity was a reflection quiz which again ties the whole thing together. So a discussion forum is actually the technology tool or the platform combined with the learning experience interaction the LSI activity these two together will help promote pure learning. Learning strategies include chats, instant messaging, live chats, message boards there are many such many such examples you will see some of these in these screenshots and images now similar to the previous point we made when you include chats or instant messaging what we need to do is design a learning activity around it. For example, you can provide a focus question to students to discuss the challenges from the previous class this is a very simple focus question and again it is related it is very relevant to every learner and that would get the discussion going and as an instructor we get just in time feedback this is another pedagogical strategy that will help us realize what were the challenges that the class faced and go on with it. A different strategy for pure learning that one can use in an e-learning context is wikis. Now a wiki is a platform where learners can collaboratively write text upload images both individually as well as together they can comment on each other's work. So the most common example of wikis that we know of is Wikipedia but this can be brought into a teaching and learning context and several e-learning platforms right from open-source LMSs like Moodle have wikis as a built-in tool like earlier it's very important to set up a clear learning activities that learners can do on the wiki. A wiki is a good way to get students to work on a collaborative project which may need several days or several weeks of work on it. There are other tools where students can collaboratively work on a certain document or a text. So Google Docs is again something we are very familiar with maybe in the professional setting this can be brought into a classroom. This tool allows learners to comment on each other to review each other's work to edit and also to create something together. In the same family of learning activities we can also design activities using online collaborative discussion boards such as Padlet or Trello. Now these tools allow learners to share text, video, audio, opinions. These are virtual walls they contain a whole list of post-it notes. It's a good way to get learners to see what others are thinking about the same issue maybe there's a give and take of ideas by both posting and reading. These tools can be used effectively to integrate technology in a face-to-face classroom. So that would be a real-time activity or it can be done asynchronously if you are creating some synchronously learning and you want students to collaborate at their own time within a given duration and after the particular activity is over say a few days later some discussion can happen about the activity. So this works in a variety of different formats. A different type of collaborative and peer learning activity is peer review or peer assessment. Now this is a very powerful strategy because in terms of learning one of the best ways most efficient and effective ways of learning is to critically examine and review one's own work and the work of one's peers. This again is backed up by a lot of studies and it can be done in a classroom context which perhaps some of you have experienced but an e-learning context is also a great medium to incorporate peer review in the in your course or in your module. There are several tools to incorporate peer review. For example peer grade is an open tool that you can use and incorporate. Moodle has a peer review mechanism. You may see examples of peer review in this course also. The reason peer review works so well is that every student is committed. Every learner submits something first and then they give feedback to other learners on the same activity. What the instructor can do what we can do to design and facilitate peer review is to provide review criteria feedback criteria or sometimes rubrics and we will see this in another learning dialogue on how to give feedback for open ended problems or open questions within an e-learning context. Another way to include the social interaction the collaboration in an e-context is to move away from only the online component and broaden it to a blended setting. So this is again something you would have experienced within this course itself. The online lessons and modules the online work is supplemented by real-time synchronous sessions and these can be done by technology tools such as Facebook live Google hangouts or any of your favorite video communication tools. So the takeaways here as we design e-learning content using a learner centric approach is that we need to design collaborative group activities for learners to establish communication to improve learning to develop skills of articulation and argumentation. We need to include tools which facilitate such activities where learners can collaborate together. We also need to give students and our learners some instruction some assistance on how to navigate these tools how to work with these tools but it's not enough to stay with the tools we need to also design explicit learning activities along with these tools or around these tools which actually require learners to work with their peers and effectively learn from each other. Thank you.