Online Course Student Collaboration Literature: A Review and Critique

University online course enrollment continues to rise at a rate higher than that of traditional, face-to-face university education, and several benefits exist to creating a collaborative online course environment. Therefore, a need exists to critically consider existing research about small group work in online courses. The present article provides a meta-synthesis of 41 articles related to this topic. This meta-synthesis includes a review of literature followed by a discussion of critiques and directions for future research about online course student collaboration. Findings from this meta-synthesis include a lack of consistent definitions within literature about student collaboration online, methodological issues in existing empirical studies, and the lack of interdisciplinary contribution to online course small group literature.