Description of Group 1

The analysis on the questionnaire refers to Appendix 2, which presents the applicable unsupervised visualisation model of the responses of the learner groups. Similarly, some charts concerning learner activity in the online learning environment are presented in Appendix 3. These group-specific descriptions and analyses are followed by a summary (subsection 6.2) of the greatest general differences in the cooperative performances of the groups (research problem 1).

In order to ensure the ethics of the present research, this chapter does not provide the names of the learners whose journal entries are quoted in the descriptions. Neither does it explicitly state who, in the various groups, the high, average or low achievers were.

Appendix 2). The motivational continuum consists of all the questions of the APLQ pertaining to motivation and thus combines intrinsic and extrinsic goal orientation, meaningfulness of studies, control beliefs, self-efficacy beliefs and test anxiety. In this combined motivational scale, the blue dots, signifying the members of Group 1, are clearly separated into two groups, two of them in the one, and three at the other end of the continuum. A similar finding is also apparent in the learning strategies part of the APLQ.

This continuum combines factors pertaining to metacognitive learning strategies in studying and at work, working by doing and resource management strategies, and it is clear that Group 1 is also divided in two on this axis.

The general feeling in Group 1 was that they interacted well in face-to-face situations and the group worked well in web discussions, although the lower achieving learners generally admitted their lesser role in the CMC system as well as in the group processing. In their study journals, the two high achievers often noted the difficulty of getting the three other members to participate and they both tried several methods to get them to join them, sending private messages and supporting them at difficult points of the studies. Part of this difference between the learners is clearly a result of their backgrounds, as one of the learners wrote during the fourth course:

In these studies, the support of the group has been invaluable to me. There are five members in our group and it has been a delight to see how the two stronger and more hard-working learners have encouraged the others. Although there are big differences in our educational backgrounds, I feel that everything has worked well.

I have admired how well some of the learners in our group can produce text and I see it as something to strive for myself.

Another learner observed the gap between himself and the high achievers, using a delightful metaphor in describing his feelings about the situation:

I followed the discussion yesterday evening and read every message and there were lots of big words. But I did not have a [dictionary] with me and I felt that I was left out of something. I feel like a small squirrel with a frozen cone.

One of the group members possessed well-developed social skills and he and one of the other dominant members had somewhat different views about the way the group worked.

The first of them demonstrated his social skills by showing interest in and understanding of the other group members, as he stated in his answers to the final questionnaire:

Certain people were more hard-working than others. The active learners created the atmosphere that drew the whole group along. But I don’t think that anyone let go completely or was ignored at any point. The life situations of some learners got harder, but that had nothing to do with these studies.

The highly socially oriented learner also noted that he felt that it was great to have some informal discussion on the message boards. On the other hand, the other member was more matter-of-fact in her approach to the discussion on the net. She observed that:

The discussions are, on one hand, great, but, on the other, there is too much that is irrelevant to the studies. It is great to realise that one gets help from others for one’s own work, but I would not like to discuss matters that fall outside the topic.

Sometimes I do it just out of politeness towards others and because I think that they might get something out of it...

It should be noted that even though the second high achiever was critical towards some aspects of the discussion on the CMC system, she still recognised the possible need of others to have less formal, socially engaging topics of discussion, and took care to behave accordingly. Furthermore, she admitted that she also needed the support of the group, when she said during the fourth course, that “At least I get motivation from this also for my individual work, when I get the feeling that ‘I belong to the group’ and that I’m not a lone, unattached learner.”

The cooperation in Group 1 changed relatively little over the course of the studies. The first course consisted mostly of group formation activities and the members were searching for their own roles in the group. The second and the third course saw a stage in which the two high achievers in the group took most of the responsibility of the group performance, while trying to urge the three other members to improve their participation. The efforts of the two active members did bear fruit at the end and one of the high achievers noticed, during the fourth course, that “Our group is discussing again: these more silent boys in our group have also joined in. This is great!” Both high achievers made a note about this new activity in the group and commented that the discussion with all different points of view gave them a lot. At this point, the group was clearly entering the production state in its development cycle and the learners began to trust each other enough for them to offer their own individual works to each other to comment on.

Despite the success of the group in terms of all the members finishing their studies successfully, it is evident that, because of their drastically different working styles and backgrounds, the group engaged in true exchange of ideas only late in their development and their group processing never reached the level that it probably might have if the members had started at a more equal level. Still, the learners received support from each other, encouraged each other and could rely on each other to finish their shared assignments, which shows that they achieved a good state of cooperation and were on their way towards collaboration by the end of the studies. In a sense, this was clearly a bi-polar group, with two high achievers with the necessary high social skills to support the other members of the group in their learning.