Collaboration did not ‘help’ and why that might be a good thing

This research-to-practice paper explores the role of collaboration in the classroom. Many computing educators create opportunities for collaboration as a strategy to help students in computing courses. Collaboration improves learning, motivation, engagement, and retention, yet academic dishonesty concerns often lead instructors to set policies that limit students from working with others. Course designers must balance allowing formative collaborations and restricting the students who ‘over collaborate’ seeking grades over learning. Understanding the value and cognitive mechanisms underlying collaboration juxtaposed with the risks to academic integrity may help educators create a comfortable equilibrium within their courses.The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic created a pseudo-natural experiment on the effects of collaboration. Students ‘lost’ many interactions we take for granted when moving from a classroom to a solitary screen. To restore some semblance of community, the author created virtual workgroups (a.k.a. pods) to replicate the circumstantial bonds of an in-person setting. The course design encouraged students to collaborate yet required them to report their collaborations, knowing that the grading included heavy scrutiny for original work. Returning to campus provided the opportunity to compare the various collaboration approaches with those formally introduced and their outcomes.A combination of survey data, status reports, and technology provides insights into how students view collaboration, their associated behaviors, and collaboration’s relationship to learning. Most students see value in and note few barriers to collaboration, but these opinions did not lead to differences in behaviors nor consistently improved outcomes. The lack of meaningful results may seem disappointing given the efforts to create a highly open and flexible collaborative learning environment. An alternative view suggests that collaboration helped but not in a way that disrupted individual learning. By adding appropriate checks and balances, courses can support open collaboration and maintain academic integrity.