Designing online learning activities for collaborative learning among engineering students

Abstract

Engineering is a field or discipline, practice, profession and art to cater to social needs. Always it works in the real world. Therefore, having hands-on experience and working with a group of people will contribute better solutions to society need. Higher education is the place where students get an opportunity to work with peers with similar interests. Collaborative learning is active learning which contributes many outcomes that are beneficial to learners and all other group members in participating and getting responsibility for their own learning. This research is to find out how we can improve Sri Lankan engineering students’ interaction via collaborative learning by using mobile technology. Furthermore, we try to answer the question how Moodle mobile APP based instructional activities can be designed and developed as tools to enhance student interactions among engineering students to achieve outcome based education? Design-Based Research (DBR) approach was taken to develop the course for online collaborative learning. Gilly Salmon’s five stage model was adopted to deliver the course. All facts considered, applying Salmon’s five stage framework to design blended courses could highly result in providing active online and traditional learning.