Creating hybrid distributed learning environments by implementing distributed collaborative writing in traditional educational settings

This paper summarizes three field experiments involving distributed collaborative writing in traditional educational settings creating a hybrid form of distributed education. One finding shows that specialized collaborative tools allowed for parallel work, group awareness, and coordination, providing substantial advantages over traditional word processors in distributed collaborative writing. However, it was also found that advanced collaborative writing tools alone did not provide optimal results in distributed collaborative writing groups; such groups also needed high levels of process structure, which can be delivered through carefully constructed scripts. Moreover, it was found that introducing face-to-face meetings in distributed collaborative writing work did not necessarily provide advantages over work that was performed in all-distributed settings. Given these findings, this paper concludes by discussing the contributions, implications, limitations, and future research possibilities for hybrid distributed education are discussed.

I. Overview of Hybrid Distributed CW Research

Early in our research, we hypothesized that tool choices would have a particularly strong impact on distributed CW because CW groups need to be able to conduct parallel work with group awareness and coordination to be effective. Tool choices greatly affect these factors [20]. All three studies used Collaboratus, a CW tool that allows parallel work, group awareness, and coordination. The next section describes Collaboratus and is followed by a summary of our studies.