- Image by tony4carr via Flickr
Collaborative learning is a specific type of educational approach for learning and teaching. It is designed to involve groups of different learners that are working all together for a specific purpose, such as to create a product, to solve some problem or to complete some kind of task. The collaborative learning concept is based on the basic idea that learning is a social act where the participants should be talking amongst themselves, and that the learning process can best occur through this talk.
There are a wide variety of different approaches that can be taken toward collaborative learning.
1 – The approach that learning is a completely active process through which the learners assimilate information, relating this brand new knowledge to the framework they already have of their prior knowledge.
2 – The concept that learning requires challenges capable of opening doors so that the learner will be able to engage actively with his or her peers, as well as to synthesize and to process information instead of simply memorizing and then regurgitating it.
3 – The approach that learners will best benefit when they are exposed to a diverse collection of viewpoints coming from people that have a wide variety of different backgrounds.
4 – The idea that learning will absolutely flourish in an environment that is social, because conversation between the learners will be allowed to take place, and during these intellectual pursuits the learner will be able to create a framework as well as a meaning for the discourse.
5 – Finally, the idea that within a collaborative learning environment, learners will be challenged not only socially but emotionally as well, especially as they are listening to the perspectives of different people, and to defend and articulate their own personal ideas. In doing this, they will be able to create conceptual frameworks of their very own.
