Distributed collaborative problem-based graduate-level learning: Students’ perspectives on communication tool selection and efficacy

There is growing interest in higher education into graduate-level learning at a distance, where participants are chosen not by where they live but by programmatic match in terms of interest, motivation, intelligence, and academic and professional background. Asynchronous, web-based educational programs have shown to be quite successful at providing quality education at a distance, however we question whether all activities necessary to build a strong academic community and give teachers and students adequate ability to engage in a wide variety of academic activities and discourse can be handled most efficaciously via asynchronous methods alone. As Internet bandwidth increases and richer media in this domain becomes more technologically efficient (requires less bandwidth with ever higher performance) the opportunity to re-introduce synchronous interaction at a distance becomes possible.At our institution a wide variety of synchronous and asynchronous tools are being developed for distance education purposes. This study tracks student selection of these tools for various types of instructional activities at varying cognitive levels, and tracks their reaction to the efficacy of the tool for the given tasks.