The Classroom Community: Digital Technology in Support of Collaborative Learning in Higher Education
Abstract: This paper reports on selected findings from a study conducted on collaborative-learning in undergraduate and post-graduate management education. Course redesign called for the inclusion of synchronous and asynchronous learning tasks in the course syllabus. The findings reported here are for the first, second, third and fourth iterations of the course carried out over a two-year period as part of a larger action research project currently underway on the use on Web 2.0 in pedagogical innovation. Student collaboration in the first instance was limited, with subsequent iterations showing increased success. This paper examines the elements which have most impacted this change and seem to have allowed the use of collaborative tasks to lead to the development of a real collaborative learning community.