EXPERIENCES IN COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

Cooperative learning is a paradigm of collaboration aimed to reach a common goal. The trend of using social networks and social media to deliver and exchange knowledge leads us to believe that collaboration skills must be strongly promoted to empower users to learn with and from each other to support the educational challenges of this century. In this paper we discuss the primary needs of a modern educational system and we present the ETCplus project, a model of cooperation that has as its primary focus students’ cooperation in an academic environment. Two distinct experiments involving cooperative learning with two international universities are discussed. The first describes a system in an environment that is left to evolve autonomously. The second presents a system in a controlled environment that uses an accelerator to speed the learning process. The process of collaboration was built on a shared platform. Students’ feedback shows that cooperative learning produces better results when consonance and resonance are reached. The paper discusses the pros and cons of the ETCplus project.