Questions, design, indicators for CSCL

Computer-supported-collaborative-learning (CSCL) has been one of the major thrusts in educational initiatives across the globe. For example, "collaborative learning" has been the buzzword since the second ICT master-plan in Singapore. The language of CSCL has since taken root in many teachers' professional development effort and repertoire of practice. However, though the processes of research, development, and implementation of CSCL in schools in Singapore have increased extensively in recent years, the mode of assessment and the deepening in understanding of collaborative learning and its environment continued to lag behind the adoption rate. Many teachers still found difficulties to trust the process of collaborative learning and to confidently say that all their students have learned in a collaborative setting. Of course, mindset and belief of teachers are of enormous significance, but we would also like to ascribe this phenomenon among teachers to the complexity of latent attributes such as learners' cognitions and emotions in the learning process, which differ significantly from traditional practice. This sets the motion for a ‘call for multimodality' in CSCL to define a more holistic way through comprehensive sets of data and analyses to understand the process and outcome of CSCL (Schneider & Blikstein, 2015). This ‘multimodality' has tremendous potential but yet to reach an easy-to-implement status, as it is now still at the early research phase. Given the myriads of development happening around the world, this panel aims to bring together existing research on various dimension and collectively derive a framework from providing teachers a systemic understanding of CSCL indicators to inform the key challenges or the critical activities in their CSCL practice.