Online education has become quite good at solving the problem of studying without sharing a classroom, but not necessarily the problem of learning with other people. The work of Silvia Martínez de Miguel López, Abraham Bernárdez-Gómez, and Juan Antonio Salmerón Aroca is interesting precisely because it shifts the focus away from platforms and towards something far less technological: what happens between students when they have to collaborate at a distance.
The study reconstructs six academic years of an online master’s programme through the experiences of 211 students, analysing portfolios and forums and complementing this material with a focus group. The period covered also provides a kind of unintended historical experiment: an opportunity to observe what changed before, during, and after the pandemic.
One of the most suggestive findings is that as technology becomes part of everyday life, it seems to become less visible. Before the pandemic, students devoted considerably more attention to digital tools; during and after it, the collaborative activities themselves became more prominent.
There is another revealing observation: when institutional tools do not adequately support the work students need to do, they build a kind of parallel classroom of their own. The official wiki coexists with WhatsApp for communication and Google Drive for collaborative writing because these tools fit more naturally with the digital practices students already know. Seen this way, an educational platform does not compete only with other educational platforms: it competes with students’ everyday digital experience.
But perhaps the article’s most important point is that collaborating online is itself something that has to be learned. Dividing students into groups and giving them a wiki does not automatically produce collaborative learning. What matters is the trust that gradually develops among group members, their different working rhythms, how tasks are distributed, unequal levels of participation, and the group’s ability to regulate itself. Students value the opportunity to compare perspectives and build knowledge with people from different disciplines, but they also describe the friction that arises when this coordination breaks down.
The study is qualitative, retrospective, and closely tied to one particular master’s programme, so its findings should not be generalised too far. But it leaves us with a conclusion that reaches beyond the case itself: perhaps online education comes of age precisely when we stop asking which tool to use and start designing the conditions in which a group of people can genuinely think and learn together, even if they never share the same room.
---
How to Cite: Martínez De Miguel López, S., Bernárdez-Gómez, A., & Salmeron Aroca, J. A. (2024). Retrospective analysis for the perception of educational tools for the development of collaborative activities in virtual environments. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 27(2), 35–55. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.27.2.38983
