Enhanced student soft skills through integrated online project based collaborative learning

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Online Project BasedCollaborative Learning (OPBCL) model in enhancing students' soft skills.This study involves qualitative and quantitative methods and usingquasiexperimental designed which involves 106 respondents from MalaysianPolytechnic. Pre and post-test with non-equivalent control group designwere used for this study. The respondents were divided into three groupscalled Control, Treatment I and Treatment II group where their softskills are assessed for comparison between traditional project basedlearning method (Control), online project based learning using CIDOSplatform (Treatment I) and online project based learning using OPBCLplatform (Treatment II). In this study, OPBCL prototype was developedbased on proposed model. The effectiveness of OPBCL prototype wasassessed using Pre and post soft skills test (SST). All collected datawere analysed using SPSS 19.0 software. Inferential analysis wasintended to test the type of non-parametric such Kruskal Wallis, MannWhitney and Wilcoxon Sign Rank Test. Findings from the pre and post softskill indicated that all groups had positive effects on the soft skillsof the students but in terms of the more successful group, the resultsshowed that Treatment II is more success than Control group followed byTreatment I group. In addition, analysing the pre and post soft skillstest of the critical thinking and problem solving (CTPS), collaboration(CS) and communication (CM) skills showed that for CTSP skill, TreatmentII is more success than Control group followed by Treatment I group.Meanwhile for CL skill, there is no significant difference betweenTreatment I and Treatment II group. However, both treatment groups aremore success than Control group. For CM skill, there is no significantdifference between Control and Treatment II group. However, both Controland Treatment II groups are more success than Treatment I group. Inconclusion, this study was able to provide evidence on students' softskills enhanced via OPBCL model. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published byIASE.