From the well-structured abstract to the declarations of conflicts of interest and ethics at the end this paper is a model of clarity and openness. It's set in a context of online team-based learning (TBL) and the community of inquiry (CoI) framework. It describes the launch of a TBL pilot as a response to the Covid pandemic. The study size is unfortunately small, but the article does what it can to capture their experience, and to present it along the lines of the types of presence described in CoI. The authors conclude "TBL enables rapid transition to distance learning; it promotes analytical and self-directed learning even in extreme circumstances." This is too broad: they should say, "In this case, and viewed from this theoretical perspective, TBL enabled rapid transition...". But I guess if they had said that, it would never have been published. And so the paper models both the best and worst of education research.
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