Collaborative writing: Online vs. frontal

Students in higher education, most frequently, use the frontal approach while being asked to collaborate on a writing assignment. However, the difficulty in collaborative writing using conventional technologies such as pen and paper, board or computer is the limited ability to view the work of your peers during the process (Baeker, Glass, Mitchell, & Posner, 1994). The aim of this study was to examine the quality of an online synchronized collaboratively written academic assignment by graduate students. We used the GROOVE tools to facilitate this study. The products of the online synchronized collaboratively written assignments were compared with similar products produced in a frontal and collaborative face-to-face approach. The study examined the academic quality of the written products achieved with both collaborative methods - online versus frontal. The qualities of the written papers were examined with an instrument called the Cognitive Level and Quality Writing Assessment (CLAQWA) (Flateby & Metzger, 2001). The instrument defines the parameters of the quality of an academic paper, which reflect the writing skills based on Bloom's taxonomy (1954). The findings of this study indicate that collaborative writing in a peer-to-peer (P2P) synchronized online environment could produce a paper of a higher quality than that produced in a P2P frontal face-to-face (F2F) environment.