Students often complain about unsatisfactory experiences resulting from disproportionate contributions to collaborative projects. To improve the experience, we applied regulation theory to design a process to document regulation on a blog and examined whether such documentation enhanced students' self-regulation and co-regulation skills while working on a collaborative project. The results indicate that students improved both their self-and coregulation skills significantly and they were highly satisfied with their experiences in the collaborative task. In addition, the content analysis performed on the documented regulation reveals that students engaged in diverse types of regulation processes through social interaction with group members. A discussion of teaching and learning strategies when using a blog in a collaborative task is included in this paper.
IntroductionCollaborating with group members is an essential skill that educators have deemed critical to student development in higher education (Summers & Volet, 2010). Successful collaboration occurs through conscious self-regulation as well as co-regulation among group members (DiDonato, 2013;Panadero, Kirschner, Järvelä, Malmberg, & Järvelä, 2015). Individually, students are expected to set goals and monitor and reflect upon their learning processes (Zimmerman, 2011). Collaboratively, group members are expected to share goals, divide roles and responsibly contribute to accomplishing common goals .Often, however, group collaboration ends unhappily due to the lack of self-regulation, which causes freeloading, or co-regulation, which results from unsystematic group reflection (Summers & Volet, 2010). Individual self-regulation and group co-regulation are, therefore, critical for the successful completion of a collaborative project (Hadwin, Järvelä, & Miller, 2011;McCaslin, 2009;Volet, Vauras, & Salonen, 2009).Not every student can skilfully regulate in both modes in a collaborative project (Cho & Lim, 2017;DiDonato, 2013; perhaps because of a lack of experience in collaboration. According to social constructivist theory, students' lack of experience in regulation can be overcome by observing skilful peers' regulation processes (Volet, Summers, & Thurman, 2009;Vygotsky, 1962). In addition, even if students know how to regulate, an absence of social support may discourage them from consistently engaging in high levels of regulation. Recognition and emotional support from group members are important for consistent regulation in collaborative projects (Cho & Cho, 2013).The use of social media is considered a promising method to support both self-regulation and co-regulation processes (Cho & Lim, 2017;Halic, Lee, Paulus, & Spence, 2010;Matzat & Vrieling, 2016;McLoughlin & Lee, 2010; Prestridge, 2014;Tan, Ladyshewsky, & Gardner, 2010). By documenting regulation on social media on a regular basis, students can observe the various ways others regulate their learning and gain the opportunity to reflect upon their own regulation processes, learning and growing as more...