A Map through the Jungle of Online Collaboration Tools

Collaborative learning fosters the development of important professional skills, such as taking accountability, communicating effectively, and providing and receiving feedback. Various tools are available to facilitate student online collaboration. However, they are generally aggregated under one big category. To help faculty select the tools that best facilitate students' online collaboration, in this poster session, we will use a collaborative process model to classify the online collaboration tools into different categories: communication, project management, content co-creation, consensus building, resource management, and presentation. We will discuss the benefits of collaborative learning, present the collaborative process model, and provide an overview and comparison of representative tools in each category.