Exploring Awareness Behaviours and Collaboration Activities in Learning Groups

Collaborative learning is a useful approach in which learners work jointly to achieve learning goals. Awareness plays a significant role in promoting collaboration opportunities and enhancing the effectiveness of the collaborative learning. This poster reports a study to explore awareness behaviours in a long-term collaborative project. The research questions focus on awareness behaviours, the changes in awareness over time, and the applications used to communicate and collaborate. Three main data collection methods were used: observations, short interviews and questionnaires. Participants were students who were working on collaborative coursework for 6 weeks. Results show that different awareness types and behaviours were evident and activity awareness was higher at the beginning of the collaborative project than it was towards the middle or the end. In addition, groups used different general-purpose applications to support their collaborations.