Collaborative online learning depends on the teacher's ability to create conditions for student interaction and engagement. The paper presents the type of activities that can foster them, as well as the results of the investigation into the levels of student engagement in online learning environment which was created by a combination of Moodle, Zoom and Google Documents. The focus is on the level of student engagement in relation to the type of interaction in the online learning environment, their previous experience with blended learning and their overall attitudes toward online classes. Toward this end, a convergent parallel mixed methods study was conducted by means of a 30-item questionnaire constructed for the purpose of this study. The questionnaire included both Likert-scale questions, aimed at collecting quantitative data, and open-ended questions, aimed at collecting qualitative data. Qualitative analysis of the respondents' comments reveals that online tools are most valued for their interactive and collaborative potential (the availability of emoticons, chatting and screen sharing in Zoom, the possibility of small group collaboration in Zoom Rooms and whole class collaboration in Google Docs). The most important quantitative results reveal that all students report medium to high levels of online classroom engagement in the presented scenarios. However, while the students who had previous experience with blended learning constructed their engagement on the basis of both online peer collaboration (in Zoom Rooms) and teacher-fronted instruction (Zoom), those with no previous experience with blended learning formed their engagement only on the basis of small group work (Zoom Rooms).
From Multiple Perspectives to Shared Understanding: A small group in an online learning environment
