With the rise of e-learning, schools need to ensure they’re implementing learning strategies that work in an online environment for ongoing learning. At the same time, businesses need to rapidly reform the way they’re conducting corporate training to encourage effective and scalable learning.
That’s where online collaborative learning comes in.
Online collaborative learning is an educational approach that emphasizes working together with others to enhance learning. In practice, it involves two or more people working together to learn, solve problems, improve decision making, and complete tasks. It focuses on students’ interpretation, exploration, and application of information rather than simply on how the teacher presents it. It’s distinctly different from traditional, teacher-centered learning, which is replaced by a more communal, participation-based style of education and training.
Echo360’s Echosystem portfolio of products has a number of online collaborative learning tools that can be used in a virtual classroom to enhance student learning, whether in an educational or corporate training situation. The Echosystem’s portfolio of products includes EchoAuthor, EchoVideo, EchoEngage, and EchoExam. Continue reading to learn what online collaborative learning tools are available within these programs.
Some learners are hesitant to participate collaboratively because they aren’t sure their input will be valued. An anonymous participation option can often get students to join in on classroom discussions that they would otherwise have remained silent during. With EchoVideo, you can share your screen and remote conversations while preserving student anonymity, encouraging more students to participate.
While other students will not know who is making which comments, you will be able to see who said what. This could help you identify learners who need a bit of extra help. You can also remove any posts that don’t conform to the rules you have set for online discussion.
EchoEngage is another program in the Echosystem that has a variety of online collaborative learning tools. One of the most versatile of these tools is the breakout room feature. Students can be put into small groups or pairs and work on a problem, share opinions about the content being learned, or create a presentation together for the class.
Students can be grouped using a number of methods. First, you could decide how many students go into each breakout room and allow the program to randomly assign them. Alternatively, you could group students by ability level so each student is challenged by working with other students of their educational ability level.
You could also use the program’s polling feature to group students. You could present a multiple-choice poll question, collect the answers, and group students who have the same answer or create groups of students representing each potential answer. Either way, you can instigate critical thinking in the students regarding the topic at hand.
EchoEngage is built with accessibility in mind so that all students can participate in online collaborative learning activities. For example, students can choose a high-contrast visual interface. It’s also possible for students to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the interface.
EchoAuthor, where you create and edit engaging presentations, uses closed captioning for videos, which can then be converted to a transcript of the entire video. This attention to accessibility creates a better overall learning experience for all students and allows students of differing abilities to work collaboratively.
With EchoExam, you can create not only classroom tests, but study guides that students can work on together in breakout rooms. You can quickly and easily create these study guides using thousands of topics and question banks, and you even have the option of using textbook-specific study guides.
Instructors, administrators, and learners everywhere can now experience the most comprehensive suite of learning engagement, assessment, and authoring solutions.
Let’s talk more to find the right solution for you.
Instructors, administrators, and learners everywhere can now experience the most comprehensive suite of learning engagement, assessment, and authoring solutions.
Let’s talk more to find the right solution for you.
Effortlessly create assignments, launch assessment questions and collect real-time responses to evaluate performance. Build on outcomes to create continuous improvement with learners at all levels.
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With over 14 different question types, you can match the assessment to the material at hand. Use traditional test question types such as true/false, multiple-choice, multiple response, numeric response, matching, completion, short answer and essay to review, re-teach and reinforce learning.
Ensuring that learners understand the information presented and how it can impact their success is key. Assess, track and analyze learner performance. Get results immediately and view valuable reports at the individual level, or for the class or group as a whole. Provide results in real-time, or at a later time as preferred.
With dynamic content, generate multiple iterations of exam questions to test the same concept. Use bimodal to toggle between multiple-choice and short answer question types, immediately changing the item difficulty level.
If these online collaborative learning tools sound like just the thing your online classroom needs to work even better for your students, contact us today. We’re happy to demonstrate how our programs can help your classroom or training environment become more collaborative.
Echo360 is driven to enable inspired learning experiences for everyone, anywhere through the high quality of solutions, tools, and standards we set for our work and ourselves.
Ensuring our solutions and tools are effective in all kinds of learning environments.
Unleashing the end-to-end learning potential of video, from creation to administration.
Designing and delivering effective engagement tools that produce results.
Providing empirical evidence of engagement, progress, and opportunity areas through easy-to-use dashboards.
Integrating seamlessly with the most widely used Learning Management Systems in education and business.
Echo360 delivers an innovative model for engaged learning in the post-Covid age. We offer coherent and compelling learner-centered experiences regardless of place and time, so all learners have the opportunities to learn.
