Engaging in an online course has traditionally been perceived to be a lonely experience, with students busy viewing video lectures, working on problem sets and interacting intermittently with others using asynchronous technologies. More recently, over the past 6-7 years, online courses have become recognized as viable delivery vehicles for online…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was two-fold: to investigate the dialog about psychosocial aspects of health care in problem based learning (PBL) groups in a single medical school; and to describe the factors that learners and PBL facilitators identify as influencing dialog about these issues in PBL groups. Medical education is a…

Research has shown that educators may be reluctant to implement group work in their teaching due to concerns about students partaking in off-task behaviours. However, such off-task interactions have been shown to promote motivation, trust, and rapport-building. This paper details a study in which student groups were video recorded as they engaged…

Interdisciplinary problem-based learning (PBL) aims to provide students with opportunities to develop the necessary skills to work with different health professionals in a collaborative manner. This discourse study examined the processes of collective knowledge construction in Japanese students in the tutorials. Analyses of video-recorded data…

The first day of a course has great potential to set the tone for the entire course, planting the seeds for habits of mind and questioning and setting in motion expectations for classroom discourse. Rather than let the first meeting contain little besides going over the syllabus, the instructor (Lesser) decided to use two sustained open-ended…

Students benefit from collaborative learning activities, but they do not automatically reach desired learning outcomes when working together (Fischer, Kollar, Mandl, & Haake, 2007; King, 2007). Learners need instructional support to increase the quality of collaborative processes and individual learning outcomes. The core challenge is to find…