The goal of this project is to support collaborative learning in engineering courses by constructing, implementing, and evaluating the effectiveness of an online Engineering Education Collaboration Environment (EECE) tool. The EECE is an Internet environment in which engineering educators, with the help of a Collaborative Coach, can design effective collaborative learning activities relevant to their curriculum. The EECE automatically maps those activities onto a wiki-based collaborative environment, in which students negotiate collaborative tasks, make decisions, and build shared knowledge among team members. The project team is designing and implementing the EECE tool at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Virginia Tech. Multiple data sources in diverse class settings are being used to evaluate the effectiveness of the EECE tool. Efforts are also being made to make the EECE tool available to engineering educators for trial in their classrooms.
Goals and Overview The importance of collaborative learning among engineering students and professionals is undeniable. The overarching goal of this project was to transform engineering students into effective collaborators via the development and promulgation of online learning environments combined with effective pedagogy that enable educators to support students’ development of collaboration skills and to improve complex learning in the context of collaborative activities. Data Collection We collected data over two years (2011 and 2012) in four different junior and senior level engineering courses that included significant collaboration activities as part of learner activities. Data collected included: Student usage metrics of the collaboration environments in both PB Wiki and later Google Drive Student learning outcomes (e.g. collaborative project scores, exam scores, homework scores) Student self report data on collaboration skills Student and faculty interviews Student focus groups Major findings: In 2011 we implemented the online collaboration environment using the PbWiki tool (pbworks.com). The wiki allowed student team members to all contribute to and comment on shared documents from any place, but did not support simultaneous editing nor did it produce word processing quality documents. Research results were mixed; we found only one significant relationship between Wiki contributions and a portion of one class’ collaborative project. All other tests proved non significant. In 2012, we responded to student and faculty needs for a simpler, more transparent system and structured our online collaboration environment using Google Drive (drive.google.com). Drive allows for sharing files amongst group members, creating file and folder structures (also sharable), simultaneous group editing, and support for multiple types of artifacts (e.g. spreadsheets, graphics, word processing documents). In 2012 we also added specific pedagogical supports for students designed to address typical barriers to effective collaboration: Reaching consensus Making decisions based on merit and project requirements rather than other less rigorous means such as a leader deciding or the majority rules. Writing collaborative reports that evidence a consistent writing style (e.g. it doesn’t read as if five individual student wrote it and pasted it together), and reflect the technical accuracy required in engineering writing The combination of the Google drive technology with the pedagogical supports proved to effective in both being positively correlated with higher learning outcomes as well as improving self reported collaboration skills. This was true in both classes in which we collected data in 2012 (the year we implemented the Google Drive environment). Additionally, qualitative data from students indicated they were satisfied with the Google Drive environment in terms of ease of use, and the features it offered to support collaboration. Intellectual Merit: The project produced high quality research using quasi experimental and qualitative methods to show that using simple "off the shelf" technology tools combined with effective pedagogical methods can produce both improved complex learning outcomes and improved collaboration skills. Other intellectual merit lies in our path to our significant outcomes. We began using the PBWiki software to create an online environment to support collaboration. Although this environment provided our data analysis team with rich data, it did not support features that both faculty and students found necessary : a) simultaneous editing and b) producing word processing quality documents that could serve as the final products students needed to turn in to faculty. We migrated to the Google Drive tools and this off the shelf tool proved to serve the needs of both faculty and students for supporting collaboration when combined with appropriate pedagogical support. Broader Impact: Our project directly touched approximately 250 students, five faculty and five graduate students. We have presented early results papers at three different international conferences; one such paper was nominated for American Educational Researchers Association’s (AERA) Division I (Education in the professions) Best paper award in 2014. We are in the process of submitting complete research papers (3 currently) to refereed journals. Collaboration skills are needed in all aspects of today’s modern society. Perhaps most significantly, the model developed during this project to partner readily available, cheap or free, off the shelf technologies with effective pedagogy to support collaboration and improved complex learning outcomes is one that is extendable to any learning discipline. It is not limited to engineering or even STEM education. We are currently applying a modified and improved version of the SCEE model to the redesign of high school level completely online science courses. SCEE like methods will be used to support asynchronous collaboration between student at a distance who will work as partners on meaningful and complex laboratory experiments. This project will be piloted during the Fall 2014 term at the Mizzou Online High School with their instructors and faculty from the University of Missouri College of Education. This new project will have the potential to reach numerous new instructors and hundreds of high school students – many from rural areas.
