Does It Matter to Be a Group Leader? Exploring the Impact of Assigned Leadership on Small Group Online Collaborative Learning

This study investigates the impact of assigned leadership role on learners' participation and learning experience in online collaborative learning. A total of 94 students of an Instructional Design course were randomly assigned into 24 small groups, with 24 group leaders randomly selected from each group. Drawing on learning analytics and self-reports, this study compared six participating behaviors and perceived collaborative learning experiences between group leaders and group members during a 12-week blended course. The findings in general support the effect of assigned leadership on learning participation rather than learning experience. The group leaders exhibited increased participating behaviors such as login, forum view, chat view, and posting when completing highly collaborative learning tasks, but failed to outperform their peer members in less interdependent learning tasks.