Designing authentic online collaboration

Abstract

Authentic online collaboration focuses upon exploring (often complex) real world problems or practice, and highlights the importance of designing learning experiences that involve interdisciplinary collaboration. All disciplines can benefit from authentic online collaboration. Our graduates need the skills and capabilities to work in diverse teams to explore and develop creative approaches to the complex problems and issues that they will face in the workplace and the wider community within an increasingly unknown future. Most professions involve some form of teamwork and collaboration across a variety of discipline and cultural boundaries, and therefore this is a key graduate capability identified by employers. “learning for an unknown future has to be a learning understood neither in terms of knowledge or skills but of human qualities and dispositions. Learning for an unknown future calls, in short, for an ontological turn.” (Barnett, 2012, p. 65) Online teamwork and collaboration is often maligned by students, however teamwork and collaboration are key graduate capabilities, and designing authentic online collaboration can lead to rich and transformative learning experiences for students as they develop this capability. "Capability is a holistic attribute and concerns the capacity to use one’s competence in novel situations rather than just the familiar, a justified level of self-efficacy for dealing with novel problems, having appropriate values, being able to work in teams, and knowing how to learn." (Hase & Kenyon, 2007, p. 113)