Most of the students that have used our materials to date also have access to the traditional large lecture classroom. The are mostly Freshman and sophomores. In fact, the only complete web based collaboration is asynchronous. The majority of the collaborations occur in the computer pods as the student are working on simulations. However, the only on-line collaboration we see dominating is question and answers of problems and concepts.
Students prefer to work on the materials together in real time.
The vision that we have would be that the chat interaction and 2-way simulations will achieve that, though the latter has not yet been implemented. This was a major surprise. Our students hated and loved the implementation of on-line homework. They felt that it held them accountable wich they both liked and disliked. They also did not like to wait for a response from the net.