Collaborative Knowledge Building in Hybrid Higher Education: Scaffolding Epistemic Agency Through Digital Knowledge Forums and Structured Peer Critique
Keywords:
Collaborative Learning Epistemic Agency Higher Education Hybrid Learning Knowledge Building Peer CritiqueAbstract
Hybrid higher education multiplies opportunities for students to co-construct knowledge across face-to-face and digital spaces, yet many courses still treat discussion boards as repositories of opinion rather than as sites of progressive knowledge building. This narrative review synthesises research on collaborative knowledge building, epistemic agency, digital knowledge forums, and structured peer critique in higher education. Anchored in Scardamalia and Bereiter's knowledge-building pedagogy and complementary work on computer-supported collaborative learning, the review examines how community knowledge goals, improvable ideas, and authoritative sources can be scaffolded in hybrid designs. Evidence indicates that well-designed knowledge forums and peer critique protocols can strengthen idea improvement, disciplinary discourse, and shared responsibility for community advances, while weak designs reproduce participation inequality, superficial commenting, and fragmented threads. The review proposes a design framework linking community knowledge objects, epistemic roles, critique routines, and hybrid orchestration, and identifies research priorities for equity, assessment of collective advances, teacher orchestration load, and culturally situated implementations beyond the dominant research geographies.
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