Innovation in Language Learning

The present study looks into how online collaborative note-taking affects post-graduate EFL student’s retention of the key element of their online lectures, as well as how those effects change over time. Over ten weeks of instruction, students (273) took collaborative notes (61 groups) based on video lectures, then subsequently took quizzes based on those videos’ contents. The students were taking a graduate science writing course and the notes they took were mined for volume, note quality, edits of others, turns, and evenness of participation. We used multiple choice questions each week to evaluate student performance to understand the weekly relationship between the note-taking variables and student performance. Interestingly, the effects of most collaborative variables on student performance were mixed, suggesting that higher levels of collaborative behaviors do not always lead to improved performance. However, importantly, the effects of note-quality were strong and consistent, but only in the second half of the semester. This suggests that learners need some time to work together before the benefits of collaborative note-taking are fully expressed. This work adds two elements to the field of collaborative learning as it relates to EFL students. The first is the finding that positive effects of collaborative note-taking are delayed, and the second is the detailed analysis of the week by week performance of post-graduate EFL students as they engage in collaborative learning. The important practical implications of this paper are that note-taking quality is of more importance than other collaborative variables, but that value only comes if the collaboration is sustained over the course of a semester.