Inspectable Collaborations in Online Distributed Classrooms

Educational technology innovations enable students to collaborate in online educational tasks, across individual, institutional, and national boundaries. However, online interactions across these boundaries are seldom transparent to each other. As a result, students are not motivated to share their best learning practices. Also, there is no singular basis on which one can compare learning practices of multiple students. In addressing these problems, we propose ´inspectability´ as a key feature of online interactions that encourages students to record and share their learning interactions using a theory-centric software tool that encourages self- and co-regulated learning. In doing so, students not only observe the product of their learning but also the process of how they learnt. These unique and computationally formal recordings of learning interactions not only allow educators to observe how learners learn, but also provide opportunities for learners to reflect on their understanding of meta-cognitive processes that they employed or neglected in their learning. We´ll discuss the need for such a system and present some key experimental observations from software prototypes.