Diversity: A Blessing or a Curse for Online Collaboration?

Abstract

Online collaboration and communication through social networks, free knowledge exchange and informal learning online are playing an important role in today’s society. Emerging technologies, that are ever-changing, combined with the complexity of the problems that the 21st century poses, requires collaborative efforts from people with diverse skills, that are able to adapt and learn whilst working on the problem at hand. These skills are referred to as fluencies (Crockett et al., 2011).Many educational theorists understand the importance of these fluencies and concur on the same principal: collaboration, digital literacies, citizenship, and the ability to problem solve are all critical skills in the 21st century. Without these skills the youth today will be unable to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape in a globally connected world (National Education Association, 2012).In accordance with the above, The European Commission, is promoting various initiatives aimed at increasing training in digital skills for the workforce and for consumers; modernising education across the EU; harnessing digital technologies for learning and for the recognition and validation of skills; and anticipating and analysing skills needs (European Commission, 2016).For these reasons, the authors, independently and without any prior knowledge of each other, joined a learning experiment: the Open Networked Learning (ONL162: http://onl162blogroll.blogspot.se) course for several months in the autumn of 2016. We were randomly assigned to the same Problem Based Learning group (PBL) and collaborated online. Our group, was part of a Community of Inquiry, (COI) consisting of more than 100 students and 25 facilitators. We worked synchronously and asynchronously.Our motivation for joining the ONL course was common curiosity, professional development and a strong believe that an international learning experiment would provide us with valuable skills needed to succeed in our various professions in today’s society.As a group we were diverse due to different educational and cultural backgrounds, occupations, philosophies, languages, characteristics that determined our approaches, communication styles, learning styles, as well as previous experiences. Despite this, we agreed on common goals besides achieving the individual ones. In this way we created a synergy and not only did we learn the obvious course content, but we learnt beyond this; we learnt about group dynamics and creativity, as well as how to collaborate despite these differences and how to make these become our strengths.Therefore, we believe diversity matters when collaborating in an educational context, as it brings to the group the “multi-perspectiveness” that is needed when looking at complex problems (Herrington & Herrington, 2006). Herrington and Herrington (2006), advocate this as an essential learning element when it comes to authentic learning tasks, especially when dealing with online environments. Furthermore, they believe that there are multiple roles to support the construction of knowledge, as it helps to articulate tacit knowledge and make it more explicit. This can only be done through diverse group members, where you have those that are perhaps more expressive, as was the case in our group.