Abstract This study investigates how collaboration is practically accomplished on large-scale online platforms, with scale understood qualitatively as asynchronous and fluid participation. Using Stack Overflow as an empirical case, it specifically examines how users collaboratively frame programming problems through questions, comments and iterative edits. Drawing on the practice-based perspective and ethnomethodology, the study uses trace ethnography and sequential analysis of selected Stack Overflow threads. Findings reveal that profession-specific shared objects (minimal reproducible examples) structured within the platform’s dual-space design, consisting of distinct question and commenting spaces, serve as crucial resources, enabling both immediate and future unknown contributors to understand and effectively engage in problem faming and problem-solving processes. Furthermore, the study identifies key interactional methods, i.e., standardized norm-enforcing requests and explicit referencing, which ensure mutual intelligibility of users’ comments and edits, essential for accomplishing collaboration at scale. The findings contribute to theoretical understandings of mass collaboration, offer design insights for platforms to facilitate the coordination of collaborative activities and provide recommendations for professional education to support productive participation in large-scale collaboration.

A key challenge in CSCL research is to find ways to support learners in becoming effective collaborators. While the effectiveness of external collaboration scripts is well established, there is a need for research into support that acknowledges learners’ autonomy during collaboration. In the present study, we compare an external collaboration script and a reflection scaffold to a control condition and examine their effects on learners’ knowledge about effective collaboration and on their groups’ interaction quality. In an experimental study that employed a 1× three-factorial design, 150 university students collaborated in groups of three to solve two information pooling problems. These groups either received an external collaboration script during collaboration, no support during collaboration but a reflection scaffold before beginning to collaborate on the second problem, or no support for their collaboration. Multilevel modeling suggests that learners in the reflection condition gained more knowledge about effective collaboration than learners who collaborated guided by an external collaboration script or learners who did not receive any support. However, we found no effect of the script or the reflection scaffold on the quality of interaction in the subsequent collaboration. Explorative analyses suggest that learners acquired knowledge particularly about those interactions that are required for solving information pooling tasks (e.g., sharing information). We discuss our findings by contrasting the design of the external collaboration script and the reflection scaffold to identify potential mechanisms behind scripting and collaborative reflection and to what extent these forms of support foster collaboration skills and engagement in productive interaction.

Teachers in a collaborative learning (CL) environment have the demanding task of monitoring several groups of students at the same time and intervening when needed. This withitness (both the situational awareness and interventions taken in class) of the teacher might be increased with the help of a guiding dashboard alerting the teacher of problems and providing suggestions for interventions. This paper introduces a quasi-experiment carried out in authentic classrooms. We examined how a mirroring and an alerting & guiding dashboard affected the withitness of teachers in a face-to-face learning environment while students discussed and used a collaborative writing tool. Twenty-four teachers were observed, interviewed, and answered surveys in three different conditions altogether: with no extra information about the situation, using a dashboard mirroring low-level data about the collaboration, and additionally an AI assistant indicating problems in pedagogical terms and potential solutions (i.e., a guiding dashboard). The results show that the situational awareness of the teachers increased with the introduction of a mirroring dashboard. The workload of the participating teachers dropped more with the introduction of an alerting & guiding dashboard, helping teachers feel less frustrated and more accomplished.

The acquisition of online interaction competencies is an important learning objective. The present study explored the relationships between the first-language heterogeneity of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) groups and the development of students’ online interaction self-efficacy via a pretest–posttest design in the context of a nine-week CSCL course. The research participants were 1525 freshmen receiving distance education who were randomly assigned to 343 CSCL groups. Independent of their own language status, students in CSCL groups featuring first-language heterogeneity exhibited lower precourse–postcourse gains in online interaction self-efficacy than students in groups without heterogeneity. Consistent with a theoretically derived moderation model, the relationships between first-language heterogeneity and self-efficacy gains were moderated by the amount of time that the groups spent on task-related communication during the initial collaboration phase (i.e., the relationships were significant when little time was spent on it but not when a great deal of time was spent on it). In contrast, the amount of time that groups spent on communication related to getting to know each other was ineffective as a significant moderator. Follow-up analyses indicated that time spent getting to know each other in first-language heterogeneous CSCL groups seems to have had the paradoxical effect of increasing rather than decreasing perceptions of heterogeneity among group members. Apparently, this effect impaired online interaction self-efficacy gains.

While there is increased interest in using movement and embodiment to support learning due to the rise in theories of embodied cognition and learning, additional work needs to be done to explore how we can make sense of students collectively developing their understanding within a mixed-reality environment. In this paper, we explore embodied communication’s individual and collective functions as a way of seeing students’ learning through embodiment. We analyze data from a mixed-reality (MR) environment: Science through Technology Enhanced Play (STEP) (Danish et al., International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 15:49–87, 2020), using descriptive statistics and interaction analysis to explore the role of gesture and movement in student classroom activities and their pre-and post-interviews. The results reveal that students appear to develop gestures for representing challenging concepts within the classroom and then use these gestures to help clarify their understanding within the interview context. We further explore how students collectively develop these gestures in the classroom, with a focus on their communicative acts, then provide a list of individual and collective functions that are supported by student gestures and embodiment within the STEP MR environment, and discuss the functions of each act. Finally, we illustrate the value of attending to these gestures for educators and designers interested in supporting embodied learning.

Helping pre-service teachers (PSTs) develop competencies in collaborative inquiry and knowledge building is crucial, but this subject remains largely unexplored in CSCL. This study examines the design and process of collaborative analytics-supported reflective assessment and its effects on promoting PSTs to develop their competencies in collaborative inquiry and knowledge building. We used a quasi-experimental design that lasted 18 weeks. The experimental group was a class of 40 PSTs who took a liberal studies course with a knowledge building design enhanced by collaborative analytics-supported reflective assessment. The comparison group was a class of 28 PSTs taught by the same instructor who studied the same inquiry topics but experienced a regular knowledge building environment using portfolios. The analysis of the PSTs’ Knowledge Forum discourse showed that collaborative analytics-supported reflective assessment helps PSTs develop collaborative inquiry competencies for community knowledge advancement. The analysis of the PSTs’ reflection using collaborative analytics and prompt questions showed that the design using KBDeX visualization and knowledge building rubrics helped them engage in productive collaborative knowledge building inquiry by involving them in continuous monitoring, analysis, negotiation, synthesis of inquiry, identification of promising routes for inquiry, and actions to guide further collective inquiry. Implications for designing CSCL collaborative-analytics enriched with reflective assessment and student agency, and broadening CSCL and knowledge building approaches to pre-service teacher education are discussed.

Collaboration scripts and heuristic worked examples have been described as powerful scaffolds to support skill acquisition in CSCL. While CSCL scripts particularly facilitate argumentative discourse within groups, heuristic worked examples provide heuristics and worked out pathways to solve domain-specific tasks. Yet, both scripts and heuristic worked examples are often designed in a one-size-fits-all fashion. Granting learners the opportunity to adapt these scaffolds to their self-perceived needs might be a way to further enhance their effects. We tested this assumption in two experiments. In experiment 1, we compared the effects of learning with adaptable and non-adaptable CSCL scripts. In experiment 2, we compared the effects of learning with adaptable and non-adaptable heuristic worked examples. University students (N = 167) learned repeatedly in pairs with either adaptable or non-adaptable scaffolding in the context of mathematical conjecture problems. Results show that adaptable CSCL scripts were partly helpful for students with higher levels of self-regulation skills. Non-adaptable maximal scaffolding supported learning of distinctive skill components. Social-discursive components were best facilitated by maximal heuristic worked examples through content knowledge scaffolds. In contrast, CSCL scripts best facilitated domain-specific skill components by scaffolding learners’ engagement in social discourse about domain knowledge. The study provides recommendations for designing adaptable scaffolding by taking into account the relation between the targeted skill component and the activities scaffolded in the learning process. We suggest conducting future studies on adaptable scaffolding with a focus on supporting learning regulation and group awareness to improve learners’ success in CSCL environments.