Students' perceptions of collaborative practices in early years' learning: Why we may need to rethink current asynchronous approaches

Abstract

This paper explores the use of discussion boards as a collaborative practice in architecture studios or other architecture classes as a means to empower communication between students and between students and teacher(s). For four years a beginning design class in an architecture school used discussion boards both as a means of communication and to submit assessable work. An evaluation of students' perceptions of the usefulness of discussion boards to their learning revealed that there was a decline from 75% to 56% in the number of students who agreed to strongly agreed that "Discussion boards were useful to my learning" during that 4-year period which is a very significant drop (p = 0.0001) in student's perceptions of their usefulness (Shannon, 2004). Students' reasons explored through qualitative research methods to reveal that students commencing University are seeking social learning experiences that connect them with their fellow learners. Whilst we would hope that discussion boards are one means for this connectivity to happen, the analysis reveals that discussion board submissions and responses seldom acknowledge and build on prior arguments (that is, they are not collaborative). Thus, true collaboration and communication suffers. Proposals to improve the usefulness of discussion boards are discussed.