A telecollaborative approach to foster students' critical thinking skills

Abstract

This study reports on a telecollaborative approach to foster students' critical thinking skills, more specifically to help them gain knowledge about a different educational culture and develop a critical perspective upon their own educational culture at the university. The study specifically examines the extent to which participation in telecollaboration enabled students to complete a critical thinking task and how students perceived their telecollaborative learning experiences. Undergraduate students taking a Critical Thinking course at a university in Turkey telecollaborated with undergraduate students at a university in the USA for three weeks. They were given a critical thinking task in which they exchanged information with their US partners, compared their education with the US education and analyzed their education from a critical thinking perspective, developed three written arguments based on the telecollaboratively-exchanged information as their final product, and reflected upon their telecollaborative learning experiences. According to the analysis of their written arguments and survey responses, telecollaboration provided students with an effective medium to complete the critical thinking task, although some students reported experiencing some problems. Suggestions are offered for better learning experiences in future telecollaborative implementations.

Applied linguistics and language education research in Turkey: 2016–2022

“…Online education in a more general sense, but also in relation to flipped learning (e.g., Ekmekçi, 2017; Girgin & Cabaroğlu, 2021; Gürlüyer & Elkılıç, 2020), multimedia learning (e.g., Cananoğlu & Akpınar, 2022; Onat, 2018; Yeşildağ & Sadık, 2021), Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) (Yaşar, 2020), telecollaboration (Akayoğlu et al, 2022; Sarıcaoğlu, 2021), and digital game based learning (e.g., Alyaz & Genç, 2016; Musaoğlu-Aydın & Akkuş-Çakır, 2022) have been within the research interests of Turkey-based scholars in recent years. Ekmekçi (2017) and Alyaz and Genç (2016), for instance, both found positive learning outcomes and positive learner attitudes when it comes to flipped learning and digital game-based language learning pedagogy, respectively.…”