Hybrid learning environment: Collaborative or competitive learning?

The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of different conditions of face-to-face learning on the participation and learning of students in the virtual community. In particular, we analyze the effect of collaboration vs intergroup competition learning on interdependence, regulation of socio-cognitive conflict, participation, and the quality of the contributions in a virtual learning platform. This study took place in an educational research course. The participants in the full investigation were 36 (94.44% females) undergraduates enrolled in the subject of educational research, which was part of a 4-year social education degree program. A Latin Squares design was applied to carry out the full investigation. The results show that conditions of collaboration without competition in face-to-face environments facilitate better quality of learning to a greater extent. In addition, there are no benefits of intergroup competition over individual competition learning. Thus, in this study, collaborative learning designs without any competition could be considered more consistent with the goal that underpins the main right to education: Each student is able to achieve what he has to achieve, taking advantage of the abilities of each and every agent in the learning community (teacher and students) to do so. These results are not consistent with previous studies. We suggest that characteristics of the sample could explain these differences between studies.