The learning artifacts students create are based on collaborative intelligence. The artifact is created based on knowledge and artifacts produced by others, and by working together and getting feedback from peers or experts. This collaborative intelligence should be acknowledged and transparent. Our ‘extended memory’, our devices, make sure memorization is becoming less important, so we want our students to be social and able to construct artificats based on work of, and together with other people.

Collaborative learning in healthcare

My current job consists of building e-learning for healthcare. Most of these e-learnings are about skills. People working in healthcare need to learn and update these skills continuously. The e-learnings are oriented on traditional, individual learning. We are currently working on incorporating assessments on the job using an app, but still this is summative assessment.

Some parts of memorization are absolutely necessary for doing a good job in healthcare. It’s necessary to practice and repeat some skills, so this knowledge ends up in procedural memory and tasks can be done without consciously thinking about them. So memorization and repetition is still important.

However, in healthcare a slow shift is happening from memorization and working individually, to working collaboratively. The physician can’t know and do everything, because medicine becomes increasingly complex. Also, a shift is happening to collaborative working with complex technology, that acts as extended memory and is taking over skills. This is discussed in this video,

So, we need to find a balance between necessary memorization and authentic, collaborative learning in healthcare (a great sentence used by one of our fellow students reviewing one of my updates).

Picturing an ideal situation

One of the topics we create content about, is the ‘5 moments of hand hygiene’. Especially importand during these pandemic times. Assuming I would have total freedom, I can imagine something like this:

We add a discussion platform on to our learning platform, like scholar. We provide students with the necessary content via e-learning, but also ask students to act out the five moments of hygiene, record is and post it. People could give each other affirmation, which can increase intrinsic motivation. By sharing these video’s, employees can also add to organization-specific knowledge of how to perform this skill in different situations. This collaborative intelligence can eventually lead to creating a hygiene policy together. Maybe even a living document online, that can always be improved when employees add new information.

Challenges

But, of course there are challenges with introducing collaborative learning. Hyunkyung and Bonk (2014) mention some challenges:

• Cultural diversity
• Time zone issues
• Time, money and stress.
• Member isolation in virtual teams
• Lack of trust and communication in the organization
• Generation gaps accepting tools
• Lack technological knowledge
• Lack of technology support
• Lack of learners awareness about effective collaboration processes
• Cognitive overload

Capdeffero and Romera (2012) mention students can be frustrated with collaborative learning experience, caused by difficulties in group organization, lack of shared goals, imbalance of commitment and quality of individual contributions and spending excess time on online collaborative tasks and difficulties in communication. Furthermore, students in certain organization can be feeling like a guinea pig with every new educational policy or staff change.

These are all things to take into consideration when building collaborative learning. So, I might start be only suggesting a discussion platform, and see where that leads to!

Practical tips

​I found some practical tips which might also be usefull for you!

• When selecting tools, consider ease of use, security and available methods of access.
• To promote collaboration, focus on organisation culture first and make sure you provide accessible and valuable information.
• Pick the right LMS and provide guidelines and training.
• Make sure to measure effectiveness.
• Start small and pick highly important issues.
• Pick the right time (hygiene might be extremely important right now, but this is not the time to implement new educational routines to improve learning on this topic).
• Don’t force people how don’t want to work with it.

References

Capdeferro, N., & Romero, M. (2012). Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences?. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(2), 26-44.

Hyunkyung, L., Bonk, C.(2014). Collaborative Learning in the Workplace: Practical Issues and Concerns. International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning, 7(2):10.

TomorrowsMed (2013). Enhancing patient safety through inter-professional collaborative learning,. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2budbee-Uro.