What strategies make people become part of a learning community and collaborate with their peers?

Train collaborative skills in academic settings

Give relevant tasks with clear guidelines

Assign tasks that are appropriate for groups to work on together

Establish different roles for a shared task

Monitoring might help but with the risk of “Big brother” feelings about being monitored

Build motivation for collaboration into the course design

Make individual work dependent on group work

Assess collaboration by grading?

According to Brindley et al., this may not help

Coherent assessment to minimise unfairness

Collaboration as part of the assessment

Intrinsic reward by assignments that allow for meaning making - pass or fail?

This involves thinking things through before the course begins

Encourage & enable regular, synchronous meetings involving the whole group

Prepare learners for collaboration and monitor progress

Have group facilitators who can encourage collaboration

Allow sufficient time

True collaboration takes longer than cooperation

There is no (letter) "I" in (the word) "team":

Establish roles/responsibilities for a shared task

Teams succeed when all members shared the same goal

Goal must be understandable and precise

Establishing sense of community through empathy

Creating a psychologically safe space for sharing

Form groups early to allow bounding

Allow flexibility to stimulate creativity in group organisation (e.g. tools, roles)

Allows learners to choose the level of privacy of their conversations (public, class, restricted)

Understand the different personalities among group members