Students can reflect on different models, articles, etc. This provides multiple perspectives in two ways, the students get to know the different models or articles with their different perspectives and the different perspectives of the peer-students on these models or articles. Collaborative learning should be carefully prepared by the designer. The students have to know, what the assignments are, the requirements, the schedule and the way of communicating with each other, technical and social. There are different ways to organise the communication technically.
Students can have a shared workspace, discuss in newsgroups, use email.
Socially, it is also good to give the students guidance in how to communicate with each other, especially when students are from other countries. It is important that students communicate very often with each other and as well if they work on a group assignment, that they plan and divide the work. The students must have the chance to get to know each other, they should get a strong group cohesiveness. This can be done to let the students introduce themselves in the learning environment by creating their own homepage, for example. Examples The CoVis Project CoVis is the abbreviation for Learning Through Collaborative Visualisation Project.