Without further adieu, your must-have collaboration tools for online learning, with particular focus on social annotation.
Collaborative learning requires learners to work together to make connections, uncover new ways of understanding concepts, and achieve a shared goal (Laal & Laal, 2012; Falcione et al. 2019). It continues to be one of the most effective instructional methods for students. In fact, studies show that collaboration increases students’ academic achievement and self-efficacy. And while it may seem more challenging to facilitate collaboration in online learning, research shows that student participation in online collaborative learning activities are related to better course outcomes — which explains the rise of online collaboration tools, like the online annotation tool, for students.
While there’s no shortage of online collaboration tools for students on the market, the best ones foster connection and community as well as provide learners with an active role and responsibility in their learning — working together to build knowledge, to explore ways to innovate, and to seek the conceptual knowledge needed to solve problems. In this article, we’re breaking down the must-have collaboration tools for online learning, with particular focus on online annotation.
If there’s just one tool you can use to improve student engagement and collaboration in online course work, let it be a social annotation tool!
Considering that video is the number one source of information for 66 percent of people and more than 55 percent of people report using video to learn new skills — this percentage is exceedingly higher for college-age teenagers — it’s imperative to include video as a part of your collaborative learning activities.
Video and the ability to annotate those videos provide an immersive, flexible, and engaging experience, with the ability to integrate information in ways that can be fun and easy to understand. The use of video has also been linked to better cognitive results and learning outcomes, compared with more traditional teaching methodology (Chi, 2013).
To drive collaboration in online learning, consider using video and annotation in the following ways.
Instructors can incorporate online annotation tools into their LMS-powered courses to encourage better discussions, improve student engagement and retention, and simplify facilitation and grading. While LMSs often power online learning, online instructors may find themselves wondering how to annotate within LMS software. Unfortunately, this capability is not built into every LMS, and not all social annotation tools are created equal. Each has varying degrees of integration with video conferencing tools — important for synchronous online class sessions — as well as differences in hosting, viewing, creation/editing, auto-captioning capabilities, and mobile readiness
However, instructors can still incorporate social annotation tools into their courses by integrating video, image, and text annotation software into their LMS environments.
The use of discussion forums or boards to support teaching & learning has a 20+ year history of practice and scholarly research. While much of its initial practice and research have been in the fields of online and distance learning, the use of online discussion boards has slowly proliferated more widely across higher education, specifically as an asynchronous component of face-to-face courses.
Powering blended course work, the online discussion board is proving to be a powerful collaboration tool. It fosters a sense of community and encourages peer-to-peer interaction, which research demonstrates improves learner engagement and achievement.
Discussions can take the form of debate or reflective sharing — led by instructors or students themselves — giving all learners the opportunity to expand upon and clarify their understanding of key ideas. It moves beyond the more passive learning forms of reading, listening, and watching and allows the learner to actively engage with their peers and instructor. The value of this kind of asynchronous online social interaction should not be underestimated.
A powerful tool for fueling meaningful interaction outside of the classroom, the discussion board can be used in a variety of ways to facilitate collaboration in online learning.
Discussion board tools will have varying degrees of integration with your learning management system, different approaches to social engagement, as well as distinct capabilities when it comes to setting multiple due dates, assessing student participation, tracking engagement, and of course, incorporating the video and social annotation tools we mentioned earlier. At the very least, you’ll want to make sure your discussion board tool of choice can support these three activities.
Vibrant, multimedia grid-like discussion boards in Harmonize help students create presence.
The process of question & answer is a foundational aspect of online teaching that is often treated as an afterthought. Too little, and you’re asking for disengagement.
But with a tool that allows you to conduct both polling and Q&A sessions with students, you have the opportunity to support better collaboration in online learning. In a study that analyzed online Q&As, results showed students interacted more on a voluntary basis with each other as well as with the instructor, supporting both their own process of inquiry as well as other students’ process of inquiry. Results also indicated that students acquired meta-cognitive development.
Similarly, polling allows students to share their perceptions and interact with each other, and also acts to inform instructors about course participants. Polls are an effective tool because they can:
Above all, Q&A and polls can be used for asynchronous collaboration that allow instructors to check in with students, creating more opportunities for engagement.
Q&A and polls should be very easy to set up and use, and can be a valuable addition to the course.
Student participation, as a significant indicator of learning, has been investigated from various perspectives. In a recent study, online chat data in an online course indicated that 89 percent of chat participation involved meaningful interactions, revealing that active online chat participation led to better engagement.
Online chat tools can create a space where students can interact and talk with one another. It can be a public space where all messages can be seen by members of the chat, and at the same time, most applications have a private feature so that students or instructors can discuss one-on-one. Chat has some very clear benefits:
Using chat in your courses can be an effective way to facilitate student collaboration in online learning.
Aside from collaboration, the ability to keep in touch with classmates also fosters camaraderie between the students, which goes a long way toward creating course community and improving engagement.
If you’re selecting a chat tool for your course, you’ll want to make sure that tool is similar in look, feel, and the capabilities of mobile texting. It’s the most familiar mode of communication to students. You’ll also want to make sure it’s connected to the other online collaboration tools you use in your course, like the online annotation tool and discussion boards; otherwise, students will leave the course to chat elsewhere — creating a risky opportunity for students to disengage with course material.
Phew! That’s a lot of tools, a lot to keep track of, and a lot of potential barriers for students and instructors. Now wouldn’t it be ideal if you could use just one app to replace all of these different tools? One with all of these functions built-in, connected to one another, and seamlessly integrated with your LMS — collaboration in online learning would be a lot easier.
The bottom line is that having access to the right online collaboration tools for students is paramount to effective online learning — and being able to effectively facilitate collaboration among students online will make or break your students’ level of engagement. As the popularity of online learning continues to rise, choosing technology that is inclusive of different learners’ styles and purposefully designed to build social connection is more important than ever.
To do all of this, some institutions rely on a variety of disconnected online collaboration tools for education, some of which aren’t fully integrated with the LMS — creating additional barriers for instructors and making it more difficult to take full advantage of a tool’s capability.
Harmonize is a suite of online collaboration tools for education that integrate seamlessly with your LMS to increase student engagement. It’s everything an instructor needs to increase student engagement and promote inclusive learning, while saving time and eliminating manual tasks. If you’re interested in seeing how Harmonize improves student engagement, let’s connect here.
