Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community (review)

Distance education offerings continue to grow at a steady pace, and librarians find themselves in new roles of supporting online courses and delivering resources to distance students. Library instruction is also increasingly being offered online. This book is primarily designed for faculty who are teaching online, particularly those new to online teaching, but others such as instructional designers and librarians who support online teaching and learning may also benefit from the book's content. Instruction librarians who are teaching credit courses or adapting the content of course-integrated research instruction for the online environment may be particularly interested.

Paloff and Pratt, who both hold PhDs from the Fielding Graduate University, are the managing partners of Crossroads Consulting, which works with a variety of educational and corporate institutions in developing online training and education programs. They have previously published three books with Jossey-Bass about online learning: Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace (1999), Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom (2001), and The Virtual Student (2003).

The book is divided into two sections, one theoretical and one practical. The first part of this work includes chapters that define collaboration and teamwork, discuss the processes for building collaborative learning environments, identify challenges to the process, and outline the need for assessment. The second portion offers concrete activities for instructors and trainers to employ.

The theoretical section of the book offers a process for online groups to be most effective, including the roles that must be played, guidelines for the group, and methods of evaluating progress and needed change. The authors acknowledge that collaboration can be difficult for some students and faculty, and they discuss a number of challenges that may need to be addressed—ranging from trust issues, resources, leadership, and time management to technical difficulties and cultural differences. Palloff and Pratt also devote a chapter to a discussion of assessment, noting that evaluating students in an online course brings a number of challenges but that evaluating collaborative work can be even more difficult. Palloff and Pratt use the well-known work of Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross in laying out methods for assessing students in the online environment.

The activities described in the second portion of the book include role playing, simulations, case studies, dyads, small group projects, jigsaw activities, blogs, virtual teams, debates, fishbowls, learning cycles, and Webquests. Many of these techniques are familiar from use in face-to-face learning environments, but the clear descriptions and examples focusing on how the activities transfer into online environments will assist instructors seeking guidance in making online learning interactive and more meaningful.

While the topics covered in this book have been discussed or covered in many other works treating online learning, having all these threads pulled together in a concise, reasonably priced volume may be valuable for many library collections.