Online Collaborative Learning Environment to Promote Leadership Roles: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the students’ leadership roles in an online collaborative learning environment. Twenty students have participated in this preliminary study. During the study, students in a small group of learning were given one task to be discussed in the online collaborative learning environment within one week. The content analysis method was performed to analyze students’ online discussion scripts to identify students’ leadership roles. The descriptive analysis shows that students performed leadership roles during the discussion and the distribution of leadership roles occurred. Knowledge contribution shows the most leadership roles performed by students because an online collaborative learning environment offers students to share their knowledge and engage during learning. This strengthens them to organize their ideas and contribute to the group to ensure they accomplish the tasks given. Nevertheless, some types of leadership were distributed evenly among group members compared to others and more frequently performed by the group members, but others were dominated by certain individuals only. Furthermore, the sequential analysis was performed to investigate how leadership roles develop in an online collaborative learning environment. The result shows eight significant sequences and the transition diagram has been visualized.  The sequential analysis diagram shows that code OM (Organizational Moves) promotes all leadership roles except for the code AA, Acknowledgement Affective. This indicates that OM is a critical leadership role in ensuring the team members are able to solve the tasks and achieve the group goals. However, further research should be extended by providing a few more tasks and weeks to observe their leadership roles over time.