Structuring online collaboration through 3TS: Task, Time and Teams

The workshop intended to bring together researchers who had been working on the general issue of "structuring online collaboration" with different approaches, be they collaboration techniques, strategies, scripts, content schemes, or any other type of structuring technique. The need for this workshop had emerged from the current intense debate, in the literature, around how it is possible to support students' online collaboration. As a matter of fact, such debate has been focusing on whether, to what extent and under what circumstances structuring the interactions among students enhances the effectiveness of collaborative processes. While some studies support the claim that an excess of freedom in the way collaborative tasks are proposed may fail to engage all team members in productive interactions, others maintain that there is a danger in over-scripting collaborative learning activities, in that too much guidance, due to an excess of structure of the task, may hinder learners creativity, flexibility and ability to self-regulate, therefore jeopardizing the co-construction of knowledge and ultimately causing a loss of effectiveness of the learning process.