Predicting cooperative work satisfaction of autonomous groups using a wiki tool in higher education

Abstract

This article reports the findings of a study on cooperative factors that predict higher education students’ satisfaction with using collaborative online tools. Although there is evidence of relationships between certain factors of teamwork and satisfaction in traditional groups that are guided by their teacher, little is known about what happens in autonomous groups without instructor support. Research on autonomous groups that use collaborative online technologies is scarce, even though these technologies are pervasive in higher education. This research adds to the existing literature by analysing students' perceived satisfaction with online teamwork in a self-regulated condition. Data were drawn from two questionnaires fulfilled by 75 postgraduate students who used a wiki to work together on a learning task in online groups without teacher assistance over the course of two months. The results revealed that the four extracted collaboration factors: communication, trust, cooperation and cohesion, showed moderate to high degrees of correlation with cooperative work satisfaction, explaining 73.8% of the variance. According to these findings, higher education students should be encouraged to build strong relationships to reach clear consensus, to interact frequently with peers and to be generous when sharing information, as teamwork satisfaction and ultimately, collaborative learning, depends largely on these factors.