Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

Efective online collaboration 139 
understanding. Te work you put into the system provides evi-
dence that you are making progress. However, it also means that 
if you are stuck, the lecturer can see this is happening and can 
provide support to help you improve your understanding. If you 
do not use the university systems for collaboration, this kind of 
beneft disappears. 
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SOCIAL MEDIA AND COLLABORATION 
As you will have read in Chapter 5, social media is a valuable 
means of discussion and allows you to connect with other stu-
dents and chat about your life at university, amongst other things. 
However, social media can also be used to help you work collabo-
ratively with other students. 
One of the obvious issues with being an online student is that you 
will not see your fellow students frequently. A signifcant part of 
campus-based interaction is where students support one another. 
Te group work you will be asked to complete as part of your 
degree has two elements. First, there is the actual work itself, such 
as the joint assignment you need to prepare with others. Second, 
though, there is the mutual support and encouragement between 
group members that is a kind of lubricant that enables the group 
to work efectively and efciently. Tis is where social media can 
step in. As already explained, you should be using university soft-
ware systems for the actual collaboration. However, you could 
then use social media to provide your fellow group members with 
support and encouragement. Tese would be messages of praise, 
for instance, for work well done. Tere is no need to keep such 
messages within the collaborative system itself as they are not 
fundamental to the progress of the work. However, there is evi-
dence that when students use social media to work together, there 
is a rise in marks of around 2 per cent (Ansari and Khan, 2020). 
Hence it is well worth investing some time to support each other 
using social media. It could well make the diference between one 
grade and another. 

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