The concept of collaboration in its broadest sense refers to the action of working with someone to produce or create something. In language classes, classroom collaboration encourages communication and cooperation among students and in effect allows them to teach one another. Nevertheless, collaboration may sometimes be annoying to teachers as students end up talking about things that are not really related to the topic being discussed in class.
However, online collaboration is different because meandering from the class objective and talking about unrelated topics is not possible, or rather not considered effective by the students involved. A reason for this is that students realise they can actually work together and achieve positive results. What is more, students even tend to grab the opportunity to establish any form of online collaboration.
There are several pedagogical advantages of online collaboration, such as developing collaborative and co-operative skills, enhancing social skills and interactions, promoting critical thinking skills as well as furthering a learning environment of trust and support. In an online collaborative environment, the teacher is less involved in the instruction and presentation of the study material thus in the position to perform more objective observation, assume the role of a controller and thus even conduct assessments of student performance realised in less stressful circumstances.
In online collaborative settings, students create study groups online and learn collaboratively with others. Basically, the essence of collaboration is being established by means of a platform or service available online. There are many such services. The most basic ones would be Facebook, Hangouts or Skype. However, if the students want to post more material, create folders, or link and hyperlink material and content, use chats and forums, etc. they should be encouraged to use some available Web 2.0 tools, such as workspaces or wikis, or use collaborative platforms, such as Think binder or OpenStudy.
A rather interesting platform that could quite effectively serve the purpose of online collaboration is Think binder. The motto promoting the platform is "It's not save to study alone!" and its purpose is to enable to create and host their study groups. By means of a closed study group in Think binder students can create a closed space where they might not only share videos, pictures and links but also collaborate with their peers through text and video chat, or use the collaborative whiteboard to work on problems.
Another interesting solution for online collaboration is OpenStudy which is ideal for sharing and recording study notes and for synchronous collaboration. It provides students with a place where they can create their own study groups or join study groups created by others.
Apart from letting students organise their own online collaboration setting, the concept of collaborative language teaching and learning can be implemented in any computer-assisted language learning context. However, such implementation requires thorough planning and preparation. The teacher would have to make sure that all formal requirements of an ordinary lesson are fulfilled including objectives, outcomes, procedures, additional activities and back-up solutions. Resources are available online. Some nice ideas can be found here:
Designing an online activity for collaborative language learning
Designing tasks for online collaborative language learning
Rationalities of collaboration for language learning in a wiki
