Collaborative Online Learning Environment:Towards a process driven approach and collective knowledge building

Teaching remains rooted in the practices of the past and continues to resist the lessons arising from educational research. Real reforms have been slow to take hold in educational systems around the world. Much of the reluctance can be attributed to a widely held misconception of the nature of learning. This project attempts to address this misconception through the development of an online learning environment that requires the collaboration of users to solve problems. The organizational structure and the central PBL tasks contained within the prototype of a Collaborative Online Learning Environment (COLE) will be described with preliminary reactions from users.