Collaborative Sites

A Collaborative Site is a custom online learning environment focused on student interaction and knowledge building.

LSS has piloted Collaborative Sites in several L&S courses, creating sites that support multiple types of interaction, including group authorship and consensus building, class glossaries, knowledge repositories, course portfolios, student journals, and literary analysis sites.

Examples include:

• Chicano Studies/Sociology 470: Alfonso Morales' students worked together to create a course portfolio, including a glossary of key terminology, responses to course readings, and posts on topics and issues in the course. In an end of semester survey, one student wrote that the Mexican Migration Portfolio (MMP) "gave students a chance to interact with one another at a different level of discourse. Class discussions are valuable but much of the thinking is off the cuff, whereas on the MMP questions and responses can be more thoroughly thought out."
• Communicative Disorders 706: Nadine Connor's students work together on team blogs to discuss the management and assessment of voice disorders. Each team posts weekly updates and makes comments on posts made by other teams. Students also use the site to collaboratively assess challenging case studies, in order to prepare for a simulated report to a physician.
• East Asian Languages and Literature 371: "The Garden" is a collaborative online reading notebook, built around a central metaphor of the course text - a garden. Rania Huntington's students built, cultivated, and maintained the interactive space while they explored Hong Lou Meng's classic of Chinese Literature, Dream of the Red Chamber. Huntington says, "It's the most fun I've ever had teaching with courseware."
• Italian 203: Renée Anne Poulin and Tom Cravens combined elements of blogging, photo-blogging, and social-networking software to facilitate communication between students outside of class time. In an end of semester survey on the "e-Diario" project, 100% of survey respondents said that the project helped them improve their Italian writing skills, 94% agreed that the project helped them make comparisons between their own culture and Italian culture, and 84% of respondents said the site was easy to use. (Response rate was 86% across five course sections.)

For more information:

• To get started on your own L&S Collaborative Site, email Doug Worsham (doug@lss.wisc.edu) or Sue Weier (sue@lss.wisc.edu)
• For more detailed information on the L&S Collaborative Sites platform, read our attached case study.

LSS is partnering with DoIT Academic Technology, the School of Education, and the School of Pharmacy to further develop the Collaborative Sites Platform, a flexible framework for the rapid development of Collaborative Sites.