System Support for Social Learning in Computer Science at a Distance University – The University of Hagen

Students working collaboratively are more successful than students working alone, these fact was shown by research on technology-supported learning and teaching have clearly confirmed the general understanding that. Therefore, it should be a logical consequence to integrate communication and collaboration as a key factor into a distance study environment. However, this is not a trivial task from various points of view. For instance, for public universities in Germany studies have to be free of charge – which then raises the question, how to finance highly interactive small classes? Another problem is the professional restrictions of working distance students: their time budget is very limited. The consequence is that students typically have very limited contact to their peers and their tutors until the final examinations. The drop-out rates are extremely high. E-learning improved the situation substantially (even though poorly used by the teachers in many environments), but by far not enough. Former research showed, that students’ want more social learning application. This paper shows how social learning could be integrated in an existing technical and organizational infrastructure and so open up new possibilities to approach these challenges, and how it can be used to improve the situation substantially.