Collaboration to cohere with the diversity

Today, Information Technology (IT) continues to bring tremendous changes in society. One of the challenges facing educational institutions worldwide is that the student body has dramatically changed. The increasing diversity of students enlarges the range of student differences in the educational system. The purpose of this study was to design an effective teaching and learning environment to accommodate individual differences in order to produce high quality learning outcome. The present study analyzed the diversity of student population (e.g., in-service teacher, full/part time students) to identify its components and characteristics (e.g., different background, experiences, subject knowledge), and designed instructional activities using IT (Web-CT, Blackboard) as a platform to connect and cohere with these components into a positive knowledge-base. Two steps were taken in this study. First, design specific instructional activities to guide students’ collaborative experiences. A series of problems and activities were developed for a module of physical education. Second, the Blackboard platform was employed to conduct collaborative interactions between instructors and students, and between students to cohere with (or accommodate) diversity. A Blackboard-based course design was utilized as an example to demonstrate the executing procedures. The present study illustrates an innovative instructional structure that uses IT to establish a multiple-way communication network between instructors and students, student and student, and allows dynamic teaching and learning activities which transform teacher-centered educational activities into student-centered collaborative learning activities. Through this innovation, students’ diverse experience structure, different physical and mental characteristics, attitudes, and perspective, are converted into a collaborative learning activity that transform diversity into a positive source of knowledge.