Collaborative or cooperative learning?

The increasingly rapid movement of undergraduate and postgraduate courses to online Web-based forms of delivery would seem to provide the ideal circumstances for non-traditional methods of teaching and learning to be re-examined. Online collaborative and cooperative learning techniques are not widely practiced in undergraduate tertiary education, despite many widely recognized advantages (see Panitz, 2000). An examination of the literature in this area suggests that researchers and practitioners writing about online collaborative learning often are writing about online cooperative learning, and vice versa. This conflation of terms makes it hard to assess implementation methods and research results. Therefore, it seems important to attempt to ascertain the similarities and differences between the two, so that theoretical and empirical research can be properly carried out into their application in an online environment.