How instructional design can be effective in promoting collective learning?

In today’s fast-paced learning environment, effective collaboration is found to be immensely worthy in fueling fresh ideas and concepts around a specific topic or subject. And, at a time when the majority of courses becoming online, instructional designers encounter a challenge to enable collaborative or collective learning while meeting the learning objectives defined by the institution or team.

One promising approach to augment productivity and effectiveness of collective learning is to engage learners through clearly-defined scripts. Here, these scripts refer to a group of guidelines for learners as to how they can form groups, interact with each other, and find the solution to a given problem to promote true learning.

Why collective learning?

There are several benefits of developing a collective learning-based online course:

o It helps optimize learning for all participants
o It helps seek fresh ideas from the students and respect their contribution
o It helps students appreciate the knowledge and skills of others
o It helps in creating personal and group answerable to finish a task or solve a problem
o It helps promote the concept of knowledge sharing and coordination.
o It helps develop and improve social skills through collaborative interactions

Technically, there are four approaches to collective learning from an instructional designer’s perspective.

1. Question-Answer Approach

This approach involves presenting a set of questions on a particular topic to the learners. They can choose to respond online through free text and their response is evaluated by an instructor. The participants with the two most contrary answers are put in a group and asked to participate in the same quiz again. This way, different groups are formed to seek answers and at the end of this practice, all the answers are discussed to create a set of the most appropriate answers that carry the best logic to the given solution.

The basic reasoning behind this exercise is to generate competition among learners and activate arguments to promote faster and valuable discussions.

This approach is quite helpful for instructional designers in engaging the learners and promoting learning through collaboration.

2. Project-based Approach

Quite evident from its name, the project-based approach promulgates project-based learning through collaboration among learner groups. Under this approach, a project is separated into different phases and each learner group is assigned a specific phase. The intermediate outcome of each phase is shared in an online social space with other groups. This helps them seek inspiration and take further decisions. Though each group comes up with its own outcome, it is only made possible through mutual support.

The logic behind this approach is to promote idea-seeding by using social space as a platform. This tactic is pretty effective for a wide range of projects, where instructional designers clearly mention each phase with precise objectives for the learners.

3. Story-writing Approach

In this case, instructional designers provide the initial episode of a story. The learners are asked to write the next chapter of the story. All inputs are observed and learners vote for the best entries. The presented story continues for a fixed number of chapters until it ends in a meaningful way.

It is important to notice that here the role of an instructional designer is limited and learners are given more control to interact with each other to keep the story engaging and powerful. This approach is quite effective in fueling creative thoughts and storyboards among learners.

4. Reciprocal Teaching Approach

Based on the idea of peer tutoring, this approach involves the use of learning material by a learner and a Subject Matter Expert (SME). One orates the first paragraph and others ask questions to him/her on the same. For the next paragraph, roles are inverted and this system continues till the course ends. Now, the role of instructional designers here is to prepare questions, besides the learning material.

While you may think that this concept doesn’t follow the orbit of collective learning as a learner is definitely less experienced than the subject matter expert, the overall outcome of such a practice is actually mutually beneficial. This is because a learner gets the opportunity to gain from the knowledge of the expert, and the subject expert strengthens its hold on the topic.

Instructional designers can choose to develop such collaborative scripts by using trending scripts to match individual or structural requirements. However, it is important to note that the idea behind this practice is not to limit the interactions in a group but make such interactions more valuable for eLearning.

By following the instructional design approaches mentioned above, higher education institutions can enable well-structured, collective learning activities that promote teamwork and social cooperation and encourage learners to develop their own perception of knowledge.

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