Introduction:

The use of online word processors has been implemented in higher education with an intent to help students developing skills for shared regulation and collaborative construction of academic texts. This research highlights the multidimensional nature of collaborative online writing, which implies the process of writing in situ, in which specific actions are carried out on the word processor, and a metacognitive domain, where students mobilize a series of regulatory strategies to coordinate the writing process.

Method:

A case study was carried out with 32 university students. Teams of four participants were formed to work collaboratively on writing a research protocol. For six weeks, the teams used an online word processor -to develop a research protocol- and an asynchronous communication forum -to coordinate their activities-. The activity logs from both online tools were collected, so that, the actions carried out by the students in the word processor and the content of the contributions made in the forums were coded.

Results:

The results highlight a diversity of regulatory strategies used by students to plan, monitor, and asses the writing process; these strategies were developed with greater recurrence in the first three weeks of collaborative work. Different patterns of collaboration were manifested in the groups: I) Regulation prior to the writing work; II) corrective regulation of the text; III) regulation for the deepening of written ideas, and IV) exclusive operation on the word processor.

Discussion or Conclusion:

Collaborative online writing goes beyond the simple fact that members of a group incorporate disjointed information into a word processor. The conclusions point that shared regulation of the writing process is related, in some cases, to an improvement in the development of texts; also, the interest in integrating procedures and instruments to demonstrate the incidence of the quality of individual participations on collaborative work and development of the text is reinforced.

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