Emerging approaches for supporting easy, engaged and effective collaborative learning

Collaborative learning is one of the key instructional strategies and is adopted world widely. In the past three to five decades, cooperative learning in a traditional classroom has been popular in the west countries and has been adopted gradually in east countries; collaborative knowledge building through online community attracted much attention in the last 10 years. With the development of social networking and the expansion of Web 2.0/x.0, the query of collaborative learning effectiveness appeared in both classrooms and online environments, which are a concern to educators, researchers and policy makers. Based on the analysis of new generation of students, in the present article, we first analyzed the issues in both F2F and online collaborative learning, and the differences of collaborative learning between the west and the east from the perspective of culture. After that, we proposed three new approaches for future CSCL studies: orchestrating diverse activities with resources, embedding assessment into learner experience, and infusing smart environment with group activities.