Abstract
This paper presents the research design and preliminary findings from a study on supporting online students in a collaborative design project. The Collaborative Investigation, Design, Evaluation and Revision (CIDER) approach was used to scaffold the learning activities. CIDER is a learn-technology-by-design approach for collaborative resource design and development. This phase of the study was conducted in a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education unit at an Australian university. Participants, working in small groups, collaboratively developed electronic teaching resources, including a digital story and a website. Data sources for this study include student artefacts, evaluation data, survey data and peer-review feedback from two unit cohorts. The results indicate that geographical proximity was not the key factor in the group's success; rather, a shared disciplinary area was a better indicator of the students' ability to develop an online resource. Moreover, the results indicate that formative evaluation via a peer review process offered a practical way of determining the quality or potential quality of a web-based learning resource before it is published.
Keywords
Computer-supported collaborative learning, learning by design, higher education.