A seminar produced for Warwick University comparing two different educational programmes that contained activities involving collaboration at a distance.

1. Learning and collaboration at a
distance
Mark Childs
Coventry University
Field Museum of Natural History

2. Today
• Two case studies that use collaboration at a
distance.
• Look at methodology for conducting
evaluation
• For each look at some of the issues that
learners have when undertaking these
activities.
• Identify strengths and weaknesses of these
environments.

3. Learning to create a better built
environment
• Project led by Coventry University
• Co-researcher Robby Soetanto
• Undergraduate module
• Civil construction engineers in Coventry
• Architecture students in Ryerson, Canada
• Task: to design a building collaboratively
• Problem-based learning

4. Ryerson to Coventry

5. Distanced-learning scenario
• Four students at each end
• Introduced to the idea of
– Conveyance
– Convergence
– Coherence
As communication elements
• Data captured through questionnaires and
interviews

6. Analysis
• Interview data analysed
– Interviews coded, sorted into nodes
– Groups designated as successful or unsuccessful
– Nodes clustered into three categories
• Distance (from transactional distance, Moore)
• Alignment (term coined as oppositional to
distance
• Impact (students also reported value to them)

7. Overall model think this is quite
complex but leave it to you to explain

8. Questions
• What in your experience would be the most
influential contributors to:
– Distance … what barriers do people face with
distanced communication?
– Alignments … what strategies to people develop
to come to overcome these barriers?
– Impact … what are the benefits, both perceived
and actual for learners undertaking these
activities?

9. Virtual teamworking factors

10. Unsuccessful collaborations

11. Successful collaborations

12. I Dig Tanzania
• Project led by Field Museum of Natural History in
Chicago
• Co-researcher Anna Peachey
• Summer programme
• School children learning about palaeontology
• Talking with students and field researchers in Dar
Es Salaam
• Approximately 50 tasks over 3 weeks
• Transmission, experiential, social construction

13. Distanced-learning scenarios
• Four groups of four students split across two
rooms for online activities.
• Videoconferencing
• Second Life
• Physical world activities
• Data captured through
surveys, interviews, blogs, chatlogs, googledo
cs,

14. 1. Adapt to your biome
• Activity 2.3
• Learning about adaptation
• Learning to construct and conduct a hypothesis
• Preparatory work: 2.2 meet your team-mates in
Second Life, discuss adaptation
• Assessed through the blog question: “List a few
ways that animals are adapted to their
environments. If the environment changes, what
might happen to those animals?”

15. The biomes

16. Avatars: before

17. Avatars: in the rainforest

18. Avatars: in the coral reef

19. Avatars: in the tundra

20. Avatars: in the desert

21. Avatars: debrief discussion

22. Findings
• Students performed reasonably well in blog
answers but were better in discussions.
• Students felt that having an initial activity on
modifying their avatar gave them a stronger
sense of identity within the environment.
• Continued to alter them throughout the
programme.

23. Individualisation
Evaluator: Do you think it helped being able to change
and become a bit more individual over the weeks
Kevin: Yeah because our first activity was to change
with the environment we were in.
Amy: Yeah we had to adapt to the environment. They
put us in certain environments and we were in the
desert and I gave myself ... I was wearing thin clothes
and I was short and agile. I had a strong sense of big
ears and a large nose. I was separate from the whole
group. My own person.

24. 2. Elephant farming
• Activity 5.4
• Goals: Understand negative and positive aspects
of local wildlife, see how interconnected and
dependent different species are on one another
• Preparatory work: Day 5, Skype calls 1) with field
scientists and 2) learners in Tanzania about
wildlife interactions, scavenger hunt around
museum for African mammals. Football warm-up.
• Assessed by blog questions: “What are common
conflicts between humans and wildlife?” “Why is
all life important?”

25. Experiential learning
• Kaley: I thought it was really funny at first and
I was laughing, then I got mad at Charlie, I
was like "Charlie stop doing that".
• Rajesh: "Charlie's an elephant ha ha ha" then
everyone got really angry (which you could
tell) because they had spikes on the walls, all
around the wall they had a bunch of spikes.

26. Seguing
• Combining the factual element from the Skype
meetings and the experiential learning from the
Second Life activities produced a cumulative effect.
• Kaley: “I think that learning about it in two different
places we got to learn a lot by going into the two
different places and looking at it in two different ways.
Like one day we would have a theme that we would
talk about every day and when we would go and talk to
the scientists or the Dar Es Salaam students we would
talk about them and ask them some questions and
learn about it and then we would go into Second Life
and do it for ourselves so it really put everything
together.”

27. 3. Create Museum Exhibit
• Activity 12.1 (final two days)
• Prior activity: creating scavenger hunt in
physical museum
• Creating the museum exhibit intended to
bring together the information the learners
had acquired over three weeks.
• Assessed through observation of exhibits

29. Red: Early/Middle Triassic

30. Blue: Early triassic

31. Results
• Groups split physically across two rooms for
entire programme. This activity presented the
only problem.
• Learners had mixed responses to acquiring
building skills.
• This activity showed up limitations of working
and communicating.
• Online design collaboration is particularly
hard, cannot support “messy talk”.

32. Questions
• What do you think the advantages are of
working in an environment like Second Life?
• What do you think are the disadvantages?
• How could you use this sort of environment in
your own work?
• What would be the barriers to your use of it?

33. Conclusions
• Learners work effectively with
discussion, experiential learning, collaboration
at a distance.
• When collaboration starts to fail, distance can
make the distrust, miscommunication
worse, other factors then become an issue
• Collaborative design is tricky though. Uses
many channels of communication
simultaneously.