By Lily Cook (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo)
Information
Virtual asynchronous courses, with no set meeting schedule, have many benefits to both students and instructors. However, it is very challenging to create opportunities in online courses for students to interact with each other, work collaboratively and create a sense of community which facilitates the learning process. As introduced by Sabbag and Frame (2021) and further explored by Sabbag et al. (2025), Collaborative Keys (CKs) are collaborative assignments given in online courses to help remedy the lack of interaction among students. In these assignments, students collaborate with one another on statistical problems, discussing their answers until ultimately coming to consensus on a final group answer for each question.
Students’ answers to the CK assignments were collected during winter 2023 in an asynchronous online introductory statistics class at California Polytechnic State University. A total of 61 students in 17 groups were enrolled in this class, but only 34 students in 10 groups in which all students gave consent to participate in the study were considered.
In this study, the Community of Inquiry (Rourke et al., 1999) framework was used to categorize and investigate students’ social interactions during the 10-week quarter. Preliminary findings indicate that CKs effectively facilitated collaboration, allowing students to connect with group members and establish a learning community through meaningful social interactions.
More information about the CKs can be found in this article: Sabbag, A., Justice, N., Frame, S., Laundroche, L., & Roggenkemper, R. (2025) The Development of Collaborative Keys to Promote Engagement in Undergraduate Online Asynchronous Statistics Courses, Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/26939169.2024.2448465