Beyond Mere Breakout Sessions: Ensuring Productive Cooperation in Online Learning

Productive cooperative learning strongly relies on interaction. This and other fundamentals of designing cooperative learning scenarios have been well-known long before the pandemic. Still, utilizing them productively seems to have been difficult in these last semesters. As people are generally more used to digital settings, we should explore learning and teaching options that go beyond the mere assignment to breakout sessions in an online course.
This workshop aims at experiencing different well-established methods for cooperative work based on core-principles of cooperative-instructional design and evaluating their implementation in a digital environment using easily accessible technology. Together we will find out, in how far the (digital) execution of these methods enables a strong promotion of interaction, a good sense of digital competencies and a productive learning environment. We will evaluate the pros and cons of using digital tools compared to non-digital tools and generate checklists and criteria
that help us to design such scenarios in the future.
Whilst our interaction will be in the digital format, the methods and tools are applicable in non-digital learning-scenarios just as well.