Through the following recommendations, the Special Committee on General Education attempts to set a coherent direction for change that offers flexibility, emphasizes quality, fosters opportunities for experimentation, raises the expectations for general education courses, and is guided by carefully designed assessment activities. Although student-based competencies in collaborative learning will vary considerably depending on the purpose of that collaboration and the educational level of the students, underlying nearly all collaborative learning activities is a distinctive set of assumptions about what teaching is, what learning is, and what the nature of knowledge is. The teacher's role in collaborative learning is to create a context in which learners can make the material their own through a process of hands-on group discovery.
Communication is the process of exchanging information and ideas.
An active process, it involves encoding, transmitting, and decoding intended messages. There are many means of communicating and many different language systems. Speech and language are only a portion of communication. Other aspects of communication may enhance or even eclipse the linguistic code. These aspects are paralinguistic, nonlinguistic, and metalinguistic.