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This case study maps the perceived collaboration between public, private and volunteer organizations during maritime crisis work, with a substantive focus on communication, information flow and distribution of activities. The exercise studied was held in the far north in Norway. It was estimated to be Europe’s most extensive exercise in 2016. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The data were collected through observations, semi-structured interviews and reviews of associated frameworks and evaluation reports. Data were collected simultaneously at five different sites.

The key findings showed an intra-organizational focus, a predominance of drills and different informal exercises instead of a cohesive exercise. This made evaluation difficult. Reasons for the fragmentation of the exercise appear to be the size of the exercise and the script.

Generalization of findings is problematic as this study involved only one exercise. However, this study has national significance, as it involved 22 public, private and volunteer stakeholder organizations, including civil emergency response units, the military, the Norwegian Civil Defence, and major maritime volunteer organizations such as the Norwegian Society for Sea Rescue. Collaboration between actors suffered from the size of the exercise. A smaller exercise, less dependency on predetermined scripts, and more receptivity toward improvisation could improve collaboration.

The study shows how collaboration fails as an effect of strict agendas and scripts to accomplish an impressive but complex and oversized exercise.

The purpose of this paper is to identify what is practiced during collaboration exercises and possible facilitators for inter-organisational collaboration.

Interviews with 23 participants from four collaboration exercises in Sweden were carried out during autumn 2011. Interview data were subjected to qualitative content analysis.

Findings indicate that the exercises tend to focus on intra-organisational routines and skills, rather than developing collaboration capacities. What the participants practiced depended on roles and order of arrival at the exercise. Exercises contributed to practicing leadership roles, which was considered essential since crises are unpredictable and require inter-organisational decision making.

The results of this study indicate that the ability to identify boundary objects, such as injured/patients, was found to be important in order for collaboration to occur. Furthermore, lessons learned from exercises could benefit from inter-organisational evaluation. By introducing and reinforcing certain elements and distinct aims of the exercise, the proactive function of collaboration exercises can be clarified.

This research investigates the perceived collaboration between public, private, and volunteer organisations during maritime crisis work, with an emphasis on learning and collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to investigate participants’ perceived collaboration training in relation to learning and usefulness.

The exercise studied in this research was run in the far North in Norway. It was estimated by the participants to be Europe’s most extensive exercise in 2016. Mixed methods research approach was applied, i.e. on-site observations, photos and interviews were conducted during the exercise. After the exercise, an online survey was distributed to emergency personnel holding different positions in conjunction with this exercise.

As reported, the exercise contributed to new insights on the relationship between collaboration and learning. The study showed that collaborative elements in exercises contribute to perceived learning (R=0.86, R²=0.74), and that learning in turn had a perceived beneficial effect on actual emergency work (R=0.79, R²=0.62).

The possible research implications from this study include more focus on collaboration and new training schemes that could increase learning and usefulness.

Collaboration between actors seemed to suffer from the size of the exercise. A smaller exercise, less dependency on predetermined scripts, and more receptivity towards improvisation could improve collaboration.

Increased awareness on the outcomes of collaboration exercise might increase their learning and usefulness, providing societies with improved rescue services.

This research implies that increased perceived collaboration has an effect on learning and usefulness in maritime exercises.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceived effects of a maritime cross-sector collaboration exercise. More specifically, this study aims to examine whether past exercise experience had an impact on the operative exercise participant’s perceived levels of collaboration, learning and usefulness.

This was a non-experimental quantitative survey-based study. A quantitative methodology was chosen over qualitative or mixed-methods methodologies as it was considered more suitable for data extraction from larger population groups, and allowed for the measurement and testing of variables using statistical methods and procedures (McCusker and Gunaydin, 2015). Data were collected from a two-day 2017 Norwegian full-scale maritime chemical oil-spill pollution exercise with partners from Norway, Germany, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden. The exercise included international public emergency response organizations and Norwegian non-governmental organizations. The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (ref. 44815) and the exercise planning organization. Data were collected using the collaboration, learning and utility (CLU) scale, which is a validated instrument designed to measure exercise participant’s perceived levels of collaboration, learning and usefulness (Berlin and Carlström, 2015).

The perceived focus on collaboration, learning and usefulness changed with the number of previous exercises attended. All CLU dimensions experienced decreases and increases, but while perceived levels of collaboration and utility reached their somewhat modest peaks among those with the most exercise experience, perceived learning was at its highest among those with none or little exercise experience, and at its lowest among those with most. These findings indicated that collaboration exercises in their current form have too little focus on collaborative learning.

Several limitations of the current study deserve to be mentioned. First, this study was limited in scope as data were collected from a limited number of participants belonging to only one organization and during one exercise. Second, demographical variables such as age and gender were not taken into consideration. Third, limitation in performing a face-to-face data collection may have resulted in missing capturing of cues, verbal and non-verbal signs, which could have resulted in a more accurate screening. Moreover, the measurements were based on the predefined CLU-items, which left room for individual interpretation and, in turn, may cause somewhat lower term validity. As the number of international and national studies on exercise effects is scarce, it is important to increase further knowledge and to learn more about the causes as to why the perceived effects of collaboration exercises are considered somewhat limited.

Exercise designers may be stimulated to have a stronger emphasis on collaborative learning during exercise planning, hence continuously work to develop scripts and scenarios in a way that leads to continuous participant perceived learning and utility.

Collaboration is established as a Norwegian national emergency preparedness principle. These findings may stimulate politicians and top crisis managers to develop national collaboration exercise script guidelines that emphasize collaborative learning and development.

This study shows how exercise experience impacted participant’s perceived levels of collaboration, learning and usefulness. Findings indicated that collaboration exercises in their current form have too little focus on collaborative learning.

In response to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, many universities have transitioned to online instruction. With learning promising to be online, at least in part, for the near future, instructors may be thinking of providing online collaborative learning opportunities to their students who are increasingly isolated from their peers because of social distancing guidelines. This paper aims to provide design recommendations for online collaborative project-based learning exercises based on this research in a software engineering course at the university level.

Through joint work between learning scientists, course instructors and software engineering practitioners, instructional design best practices of alignment between the context of the learners, the learning objectives, the task and the assessment are actualized in the design of collaborative programming projects for supporting learning. The design, first segments a short real-time collaborative exercise into tasks, each with a problem-solving phase where students participate in collaborative programming, and a reflection phase for reflecting on what they learned in the task. Within these phases, a role-assignment paradigm scaffolds collaboration by assigning groups of four students to four complementary roles that rotate after each task.

By aligning each task with granular learning objectives, significant pre- to post-test learning from the exercise as well as each task is observed.

The roles used in the paradigm discourage divide-and-conquer tendencies often associated with collaborative projects. By requiring students to discuss conflicting ideas to arrive at a consensus implementation, their ideas are made explicit, thus providing opportunities for clarifying misconceptions through discussion and learning from the collaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to study why collaboration among police, fire, and ambulance services is minimised at accident scenes.

Observations and semi‐structured interviews were carried out during 2007‐2008. The data material comprises a total of 248 hours of observations on 20 occasions and 57 interviews with 80 people.

The study identifies the difference between rhetoric and practice in connection with accident work. Collaboration is seen as a rhetorical ideal rather than something that is carried out in normal practice. Asymmetry, uncertainty and lack of incentives are important explanations as to why only limited forms of collaboration are actually implemented.

The paper shows a distinction between collaboration as rhetoric and practical collaboration at accident scenes.

The article proposes a multi‐faceted collaboration concept. In this way, collaboration can be developed and refined.

The results of the study show that police, fire, and ambulance services want to develop excellent forms of collaboration at the accident scene, but avoid this as it leads to uncertainty and asymmetries and because of a lack of incentives. However, simpler forms of collaboration may be realistic in the organisation of everyday work at accident scenes.

The present paper aims to explore the potential of joint foresight exercises in serving joint programming, a concept highlighted in furthering the creation of the European Research Area (ERA).

The paper starts with setting the context, i.e. the ERA concept, and the importance of joint programming. It then explores the potential of joint foresight in serving joint programming. This is done by analysing the current situation of trans‐national foresight based on the EFMN pool of foresight exercises. Then, possible modes and issues of trans‐national foresight collaboration, as well as perceived benefits and challenges, are also examined in setting a framework for foresight collaboration.

Joint foresight is not carried out in a fully fledged mode, yet but both interest and potential is high. A framework for foresight collaboration can already be set. EFMN is a valuable source of information and also holds a central, synergistic and complementary role in relation to other sources in defining the way to go forward in joint foresight.

The framework for foresight collaboration can form the basis for strategic discussions across EU member states as well as for further research to clarify and enrich understanding of the governing conditions and variables.

The paper proves that EFMN is both a significant pool of information and holds a complementary role in defining the way forward in supporting joint programming under the ERA. The foresight collaboration framework first attempted here is also worth exploiting further.

This study aims to investigate how boundary work is carried out at the incident site during exercises with police, ambulance and rescue services, and how boundary awareness is developed based on this boundary work. Collaboration in emergency work is challenging on many levels. The unforeseen and temporary nature of incidents presents basic challenges. Another important challenge is boundaries between specialised and autonomous emergency service organisations. Knowledge on how exercises are performed to increase the individuals' and organisations' preparedness for future joint-response work is relatively limited.

Empirically, full-scale exercises involving police, ambulance and rescue services and with repetition of practical scenarios and joint-reflection seminars are studied. Interview data with 26 exercise participants were analysed using thematic analysis. The analytic focus is on how boundaries are identified, negotiated and managed in the participants’ work.

Much of the work in the exercises was performed within distinct areas of expertise, in accordance with concrete routines, skills and responsibilities. Boundary work was often organised in the form of distribution of labour or creating chains of actions. The exercises shed light on challenges related to other aspects of emergency response, such as a lack of resources, diverging primary responsibilities, time-criticality and hazardous environments. The design allowed participants to explicate boundaries, to test and discuss alternative solutions and to visualise the effects of different solutions, as the scenarios were repeated.

The study found that the boundaries that were identified were often of institutional character, and were also related to the specific scenarios and to the actions taken in the activities. By integrating real-life experiences of collaborative work in the exercise, the exercise gained a certain meaning that was essential for the participants to develop boundary awareness.

Digital learning has become a global trend. Partly or fully automatic learning systems are integrated into education in schools and universities on a previously unseen scale. Learning systems have a lot of potential for re-education, life-long learning and for increasing access to educational resources. Learning systems create massive amounts of data about learning behaviour. Analysing that data for educational decision making has become an important track of research. The purpose of this paper is to analyse data from an intermediate-level computer science course, which was taught to 141 students in spring 2018 at University of Turku, Department of Future Technologies, Finland.

The available variables included number of submissions, submission times, variables of groupwork and final grades. Associations between these variables were looked at to reveal patterns in students’ learning behaviour.

It was found that time usage differs per different grades so that students with grade 4 out of 5 used most time. Also, it was found that studying at night is connected to weaker learning outcomes than studying during daytime. Several issues in relation to groupwork were revealed. For example, associations were found between prior skills, preference for individual vs groupwork, and course learning outcomes.

The research was limited by the domain of available variables, which is a common limitation in learning analytics research.

The practical implications include important ideas for future research and interventions in digital learning.

The importance of research on soft skills, social skills and collaboration is highlighted.

The paper points a number of important ideas for future research. One important observation is that some research questions in learning analytics need qualitative approaches, which need to be added to the toolbox of learning analytics research.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a group of International Baccalaureate (IB) Physics teachers exercise collective agency by initiating and facilitating their own collaboration using online tools across time zones and school contexts. The paper seeks to inform teacher communities, school leaders, policy and the growing body of literature about teacher agency.

This paper uses qualitative case study approach. Data were gathered from individual interviews, classroom observations and the group’s meeting agendas, notes and reflections.

Central to the group’s work is a norm of teaching “lock-step,” meaning they teach approximately the same lesson at approximately the same time. The norm enabled them to exercise collective agency over the curriculum and professional learning by establishing conditions for sharing knowledge and experiences and fostering accountability while still allowing for some individual adaptation.

An implication for teacher communities is that the norm of lock-step may be of benefit for improving curriculum (or other educational reforms) when the intention of the norm is to advance the collective (vs marching at the same pace). The study underscores the value of school leaders providing opportunities for teacher choice and voice in the design and facilitation of their learning communities.

The case of the IB Physics group contrasts decades of research showing that teachers cling to their autonomy. Group members were willing to give up a good deal of their individual autonomy for the benefits they derived from their collaboration.