Three conditions for remote collaborative learning and the ways to enable them in an online space
By Jeet Bhatia, Sanna Gunnarsson, Hayley Ho, Mateusz Kałuża, and Kateryna Pereverza
With this story we summarize reflections from our experiences of digitalising collaborations, learning and working during 2020 — the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. This story is the outcome of an experimental process of collaborative writing that we kicked off with a hackathon-styled event. The story belongs to the “Meaningful collaborations for systems transformations” series which explores what meaningful collaborations are and how they can be initiated, developed and sustained in practice.
As in 2020 many academic institutions and universities around the world had to quickly move into online spaces to teach, learn and research, there has been increasing interest in remote collaboration with a focus on learning. By writing this story and sharing our reflections, we hope to contribute to more intentional design for remote collaborative learning in online spaces. We believe this story can be of interest for educators, learners, facilitators, and anyone engaged with setting up remote collaborative learning.
Remote meet-ups “Meaningful collaborations”
This story is written as a spin-off of the “Meaningful collaborations” meet-ups which were launched in April 2020 by a group of students and teachers of the “Transdisciplinary Approaches for Systems Innovations” course in KTH, Stockholm. With the shared experience of the course, where there had been a focus on setting up, facilitating and contributing to the processes of collaborative learning and exploration, we created a following meet-up series as a space to reflect and explore these issues in more depth.
While this story is written as a collaborative writing experiment by five members of the group, it builds on the ideas and reflections developed in the setting of the meet-ups which is a total of seven members. Due to pandemic recommendations, all the meet-ups have taken place remotely in an online space. This format enabled us to connect every third week, and it may be concluded today that it played a significant role in maintaining the continuity. It not only removed the need for travel time so that it is easier to fit around study and work commitments, but also meant that as members moved from Stockholm to other cities and countries, they could continue to fully participate. Our different locations gave us a rich backdrop to share a variety of experiences from different settings. When reflecting on and comparing these experiences, we were often guided by the question of what makes remote collaborations efficient and enjoyable, what factors or conditions play a role and how they can be enabled in online spaces. Apart from sharing external experiences, we actively experimented with different tools and techniques to facilitate our meet-ups and make them a space for meaningful collaborations.
Our take on remote collaborative learning
Before diving into conditions for remote collaborative learning, a few words should be shared on our approach to this concept. At the core, lies the joint understanding that learning can be enhanced by meaningful collaboration and creating a space for reflexivity which would allow to nurture learning from experience and practice. Collaborative learning was one of the areas of interest for Kate and Hayley when developing facilitation techniques during the course in January-March 2020, and they shared their reflections in a story focused on the design for collaborative, active and reflexive learning. Others in the meet-up often experienced collaborative learning as an essential part in higher education group-based work. Prior to the onset of pandemic recommendations, most of our experiences came from non-remote physical settings. We used this opportunity, as we explored how to co-create our remote meet-ups, to reflect on and experiment with different ideas related to collaborative learning when all participants are sitting in different locations.
Three conditions for remote collaborative learning
Through the continuous reflection of our own collaborative process, we noticed three conditions to be particularly important for us in setting up an online space for remote collaborative learning and exploration. They are trust, social connection and agency. Although these conditions are also ones that we find important in physical non-remote situations, what struck us is that they were even more of a challenge in remote collaborative processes and thus often are missing if not intentionally facilitated.
Trust
Trust is a prerequisite for open communication and discussion, and thus collaboration since it creates a space in which everyone feels safe to contribute. In a remote learning setting, there are additional dimensions as we navigate online behaviours that either compromise or build trust. With the online format making it so easy to document everything, social norms in relation to ethical behaviour around privacy and integrity must be agreed upon. While this was not an issue encountered during our meet-ups, some of us had been in situations where conference call video or photo footage of students had been shared without permission.
Since many of us also take part in video calls from our personal living spaces, this type of sharing without agreement can be even more sensitive. Blurring the boundaries between “professional” and “private” spheres however, can in some ways be a great enabler in building trust. We found ourselves connecting as we sat conversing in comfy home clothes while catching a glimpse into each others’ homes and families. A situation that both requires and has the potential to enhance trust. Only when we feel safe by trusting others and having that reciprocated, do we have no fear in fully contributing our thoughts and ideas. Looking at trust more in depth, we found that it often takes time and structures to set up, especially in a group since so many more social connections need to take place. Even then, it is perceived differently by each member. From our context, we reflected on how our shared experience of building trust during the course provided a strong foundation to further build our collaboration on. Naturally, initiating remote collaborative learning where participants do not know each other from before requires even stronger engagement in trust building activities and techniques.
Social connection
Social connection is central in collaborative learning as it is an enabler of trust and a core psychological need where we as social beings have the desire to connect to others and interact. A common observation we often heard and discussed this year was how much we missed social connections after moving into remote study and work situations, and how much more difficult it is to build social connections with people we have not met before or do not know so well but have to immediately start to collaborate and learn with.
Why do so many of us perceive building new social connections as so difficult in remote interactions related to collaborative learning? On a practical level, in settings such as video calls, we can only pick up on the communication that is verbal. We miss out on our other senses such as touch and smell, and have trouble picking up non-verbal messages that are often conveyed through subtle body language. Since collaborative learning by its nature involves a group, as each person’s video image shrinks making it harder to see everyone and we are required to become familiar with so many more people, this becomes even more of a challenge. These gaps in communication act as inhibitors to building social connections. While digital and online forms of interaction such as text communication and shared digital platforms have become commonplace tools for collaborative learning, it has always been supported by familiar physical learning environments. Having had to shift suddenly into fully remote contexts without the support of a shared physicality, we have not had enough time to adapt mentally and to develop tools and methods to fill in the gaps in communication that is required to build certain social connections. On the one hand, we have the reaction of trying to imitate joint physical spaces online, while on the other we are starting to embrace and explore the possibilities that remote communication can bring. Fun video backgrounds and exaggerated gestures are just a starting point of what the possibilities could be.
Agency
Sense of agency is often referred to as the experience of being in control of one’s own actions and the consequences of them. Experiencing limited agency can lead to decreased engagement and motivation and thus collaboration. On the one hand, remote participation can increase our agency compared to the physical setting. We can choose to some extent from where we participate, and it allows us the flexibility to combine more easily personal home-based activities such as doing the laundry with work activities, such as writing an article. Current digital social norms accept certain behaviours that would have been less acceptable in physical settings, such as leaving a meeting early without explanation, multi-tasking and choosing to listen to a recording of a lecture at double speed at another time. This for sure allows for a certain autonomy and agency in terms of time management and flexibility.
On the other hand, as we have found ourselves in the situation of interacting almost entirely remotely due to circumstance rather than choice, we often feel that our individual sense of agency is reduced. In the context of remote collaborative learning, our shared experiences have shown that agency is not naturally supported or created by commonly used softwares or techniques. Often due to software limitations or the way that the interactions are facilitated, video meetings or workshops provide little possibility to decide who you want to talk to or how you want to interact with the content provided. Even though you might experience greater control over how you spend your time, the agency over how you want to participate and engage in a collaborative learning process is limited.
Tools and techniques to enable remote collaborative learning
In our joint meet-ups during 2020, we explored different tools and techniques to overcome the challenges of building trust, social connection and agency present in the remote format. In our meet-ups the basic setup of tools came to be Zoom for video calls and Miro as a space for co-creation and sharing. These tools were selected based on availability and prior experience from one or several members in the group. Yet we quickly realised that relying on software alone is not enough and we have to add certain techniques, principles and approaches which would allow us to use the software in a way enabling the three conditions we found important.
Since the relationships that resulted from the structure of the course were no longer sufficient for the context of our small collaborative meet-up group, we found that it helped to know why people were participating, where they came from, and what they expected from the process. In one of our first meet-ups, we focused on getting to know each other. During a two-hour session, we mapped and connected over topics and issues drawn from everyone’s individual mood-board style presentation of themselves. As we shared our professional and personal interests from our homes, we began to make connections on which we could build discussions on topics that we were interested in exploring collaboratively. By sharing personal experiences, we also began to socially connect as we opened up to wide-ranging discussions.
We set up a shared online space in Miro for discussions, recommendations, background stories and reflections. By creating new boards for each meet-up, we naturally created documentation of our process from which we could both refer back to and reflect on later, and also provide those who were not able to join in certain meet-ups to catch up. Being able to track the history of our meet-ups in such a visual way created the feeling of a joint journey that we had shared and built together.
In addition to exploring tools and techniques for social connection and trust, we actively explored ways of enabling a sense of agency by ensuring the process and the format was co-created to enable each of us to participate as much or as little as was realistic. One technique that we found particularly useful was sharing the responsibility for hosting the meet-ups, taking it in turns to both organise the practicalities such as sending a meeting link and reminders, as well as setting up the Miro boards or framework that would hold the content for the session. The content for the session was created by inviting everyone to contribute with ideas, information and questions that they wanted to share and discuss. The way our meet-ups were run evolved through a co-created process that went through cycles of reflection and action. These collaborative techniques build on co-creation and shared responsibility led to that we all experienced a strengthened sense of agency over our processes.
Conclusion
The digitalisation of work and learning environments has undoubtedly sped up due to the pandemic, a transition that has changed how we relate to and participate in collaborative and learning practices. With this story, our hope has been to contribute with insights which can support more intentional design for remote collaborative learning in online spaces. We have the digital tools for multi-user communications and for real time collaboration. What is needed is to continue exploring how we can adapt or enhance these tools and what techniques can be utilized to create digital spaces for fostering shared experiences which engender a sense of belonging to a group as well as agency over individual actions.
Be it physical or remote, collaborative learning requires spaces for reflexivity to draw insights from our experiences and practice. We have to dedicate time and put techniques in place to collect reflections after taking actions. In our meet-ups we tried to create a context which would allow for exploration and experimentation with tools and techniques, while keeping a reflexive approach and tracking our process. A special feature of these meet-ups was the absence of strict deadlines or expectation of tangible outcomes by a certain date. We found such a setup beneficial for learning from situations we encountered this year with digitalisation of our research and education. It allowed us to continuously build upon the previous discussions and add more observations related to the three conditions we found important for remote collaborative learning: trust, social connections and agency.
As we continue our explorations and reflections based on our initial insights, further inspiration and input can be drawn from other online collaborative contexts such as gaming, wikipedia and reddit, which were disruptive for its time and now still evolving. The year of 2020 is coming to an end, but our exploration of meaningful collaborations will continue. As we transition into a new year where remote collaboration hopefully will be more voluntary, we are excited about what new insights might be at the horizon.
Acknowledgments
This story emerged as an outcome of thought-provoking and inspiring meet-ups in the company of its five co-authors and two more members — Silvio and Ana. We would like to thank them for bringing their experiences and thoughts into our joint discussions.
About the Authors
Jeet Bhatia is an Energy for Smart cities masters student with InnoEnergy with first year in KTH, Stockholm and second year in KU Leuven. He has worked with several projects with solar photovoltaics, solar thermal and in designing Electric vehicles and spent the last 5 years playing professional badminton. An ardent believer in the power of community he has volunteered in community forestation and building projects, and is currently living in a community house as he writes his masters thesis on visualizing the ways to mitigate possible disruptions caused by the advent of Electric vehicles.
Sanna Gunnarsson has six years of experience from working with education for sustainable development through student-led education at Uppsala University. Sanna is currently a second year MSc student at KTH within the field of sustainable urban planning and design and will dedicate her master’s thesis into exploring the ongoing climate transition of Swedish municipalities. She is passionate about facilitating collaborative processes that can help support the transition into more sustainable cities and communities.
Hayley Ho develops participatory processes and methodology to work with stakeholders from municipalities, industry and communities to address societal and sustainability issues. Hayley has worked for over 10 years in London and Hong Kong for international, local and start up companies on product and packaging, cultural and trend research, brand and marketing strategies, exhibitions and seminars, as well as initiatives to encourage conversations about ethnic cultures, craft, sustainability and creativity. Currently, Hayley works as a designer and researcher in the group Prototyping Societies at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.
Mateusz Kałuża is an ¨Energy for Smart Cities¨ double-degree MSc student at KTH, Stockholm and UPC, Barcelona under the auspices of EIT InnoEnergy Master School. Passionate about mobility and sustainable transition within urban areas in particular, he dedicated the last years to entrepreneurial formation with aim to understand the non-technical factors that govern successful projects at each stage of their maturity. A sports enthusiast, specialized in long-distance running, thus, constantly asking himself how to transform cities into more walkable. Currently, Mateusz is part of EIT Urban Mobility working towards implementation of human-centered mobility standards in cities of the future.
Kateryna Pereverza is a researcher in the area of sustainability transitions and systems design. In her PhD thesis she advanced the modular Participatory backcasting, mPB as a framework for steering sustainability transitions. Kateryna has more than 10 years of experience of teaching backcasting for students and practitioners. She practices transdisciplinary and action research with a focus on collaborative and active learning among those involved. Currently, Kateryna is a postdoctoral researcher in Urban Analytics and Transition research group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
