Investigating Collaborative Learning Effect in Blended Learning Environment by Utilizing Moodle and WeChat

With recent development of collaborative studies in blended learning, the importance of exploring its effect has been widely acknowledged. Combining multiple technologies in support of collaboration is challenging. In order to facilitate the fruitful execution of the collaborative learning techniques, the study explored the pedagogical effectiveness in blended learning environment combining Moodle and WeChat simultaneously. A total of 78 students participated in this experiment as part of a half-semester information technology education course, the course contained an online forum supporting the students' collaborative discussion after class, adopting social network analysis (SNA), content analysis and questionnaires to analyze social network structure feature, collaborative knowledge building level and learning effects in Moodle and WeChat. Experimental results suggest that Moodle is superior to WeChat. Moodle can promote effective collaborative learning and a majority of students prefer to collaborate in Moodle. The discovery presented in this paper can be helpful for future researches on blended collaborative learning settings.