CSCL in social media : how learners demonstrate socially shared regulations of learning?

Abstract

This research has the purpose to identify how the international higher education students regulate their learning in group level in a CSCL course held in 2015 through Facebook group page. CSCL is one of the latest practices in distance education that supports knowledge co-construction. To achieve productive discussions in collaborative tasks, students must regulate their learning, having a script or guidelines that also stimulates learners to reflect and construct better outcomes (Kirschner & Erkens, 2013). No studies analyse the use of social media as the principal tool for collaborative learning activities and associates them to the SSRL method were found. The participants are 12 international higher education students, who were randomly divided into three different Facebook group pages, with the objective of responding to questions accordingly with the scripts provided. This research is an explanatory case study, in which results revealed that it is possible to demonstrate SSRL in social media, and suggest that SSRL strategies have heterogeneous effects on how learners constructed new knowledge and behaved on the social media in a CSCL course. Future educational researchers should design more effective scripts that are necessary for students to progress and accomplish tasks successfully that achieve new knowledge, predicting all aspects of deviation from the objectives of the task.