Global Climate Exchange: Peer collaboration in a “Global classroom”

Abstract

This paper reports on student peer collaboration in an online environment in an international shared curriculum, the Global Climate Exchange. Four cohorts of students (age 16 -19) from Canada, China, Norway and Sweden (n=157) were engaged in four wiki-based activities where they collaborated with peers locally and internationally. Previously, impact from Global Climate Exchange on students’ conceptual understanding was analysed, indicating a positive impact which might be explained by the amount of interactions with peers and international peer collaboration.  This paper looks further into the details of the students’ peer interactions in terms of how they communicate in the online Global Climate Exchange learning environment. The study revealed that communication between international peers might be more constructive than when communication is limited to national peers. This might be a possible explanation for our previously findings indicating that international peer collaboration may well be an approach to enhance students’ conceptual understanding of climate change.