Fostering Collaborative Learning in Videoconferencing: the influence of content schemes and collaboration scripts on collaboration outcomes and individual learning outcomes

Videoconferencing is expected to become increasingly important for tele‐learning environments. This study investigates how to foster collaborative learning through videoconferencing. A collaborative teaching scenario was selected as the learning environment, which required the learners to teach one another theories. In this study, the effects of different types of support for this collaboration were investigated. The main focus is on how both (1) content schemes and (2) collaboration scripts improve the collaboration outcome and foster individual learning outcomes. Results indicate that content schemes as well as collaboration scripts were beneficial to collaboration outcomes. Furthermore, learners supported by a collaboration script seemed to profit more from collaboration than learners without a script.