Technology-Enhanced Systems and Tools for Collaborative Learning Scaffolding

This chapter presents the combined results and over-arching conclusions of a two-phase project to assess a pilot distributed e-learning repository for computer-based assessment resources. This investigation takes place within the larger concerns of communities of practice, such as learners interacting with computer-based assessments or the tutors delivering courses or developing themselves as professionals. On the one hand, the online repository not only offers easy ac-cess to online quality materials, but communities of learners may overlap and in-teract through a distributed repository, using such collaborative web-technologies for lifelong learning, particularly as their size and content expand into large scale digital libraries. On the other hand, the online repository enables tutors to share knowledge about the courses and could well serve to create a virtual network among tutors for sharing knowledge and views related to the teaching activity. The online repository presented in this chapter has been evaluated in with real us-ers in two phases. The first phase investigated direct users perceptions of the re-pository and its usability and pedagogical effectiveness with a toolkit of six ex-perimental methods for triangulation. The second phase consisted of interviews with senior staff involved in educational management roles to assess the wider or-ganisational perspective on the acceptability of such a repository. The results of this study showed the benefits of using the e-learning distributed repository to support learning processes of a community of learners and the importance of eva-luating the online repository with real learners in order to achieve its organiza tional acceptability.

The emergence and huge success of 2.0 applications on the internet and, more specifically, of social networks, has led to new questions being asked as to the potential of the latter as learning platforms. Social networks are an important space for sharing learning resources and an opportunity for the collective construction of knowledge. Several authors consider that the learning acquired from participating in social networks does not follow the parameters associated with on-site education, or with what we can now begin to call “traditional e-learning”. Therefore, the need presents for considering the characteristics of this 2.0 learning: Do social networks provide a real learning opportunity? In what way and what are its characteristics? The purpose of this chapter is to offer an initial approach to the changes in the methods and practices of academic staff and students when learning using these social networks, specifically Facebook.

The “E-Warehouse” Framework is an innovative concept that provides an integrated learning environment for collaborative enterprise learning. It is based on an enabling computing foundation, learning pillars, and an integrating roof, which allows for cross-functional applications. Curriculum materials were developed to incorporate theory, homework, case studies, and other learning material by utilizing reference textbooks, journal articles, and other pertinent publications. These resources were converted into instructional material using multimedia tools in order to facilitate its effective dissemination and customization. Two software packages have been developed associated with E-Warehouse. The first allows the system administrators to create content modules, and the second package allows a user to customize the content. Additionally, a functional quiz application was developed, which allows a user to selection from a repository of questions, add their own questions, and grade the quizzes.

The rise of a new class of collaboration tools should encourage us to examine parts of the collaborative process that may have been less valuable to examine in the past. Specifically, this research examines a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment that makes possible new modalities for student-instructor collaboration. In particular, this environment makes possible time-shifted collaboration that allows students to collaborate interactively with instructors in real time with no noticeable delay, without requiring both individuals to be actively engaged at the same time. This learning environment makes it possible to examine both new ways in which students and instructors collaborate and to provide new evidence that addresses one of the fundamental problems faced by students - procrastination. Data routinely collected as part of this (CSCL) environment make it possible to empirically examine student behaviors and performance. This method of collaboration brings up an interesting dimension in education: A deadline can be assigned and the student can continue to collaborate with the instructor in a time-shifted manner right until the deadline. It becomes a natural question to ask how students alter their behavior as the time to deadline approaches. This paper empirically examines student behavior as time to deadline approaches and interprets that behavior using a rational framework based on Temporal Motivation Theory. Both qualitative and quantitative data are presented to highlight changes in student behavior and performance as time to deadline approaches.

This chapter constitutes an overview of logfile-based interaction analysis techniques that can be used for the support of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) activities. Interaction analysis is central in the study of CSCL activities, since in such activities through interactions between partners the state of evolving group knowledge is communicated. This interaction is facilitated by tools that allow logging of events that take place, capturing thus information about the content and the process of collaboration. Automated analysis techniques of this information can be developed. The objective of this analysis is often to support participants, in several ways: explicitly, by providing feedback to them in order to regulate their practices, or by making adaptive changes to some aspects of the collaborative setting; or implicitly, by making available to them representations of their activities. This chapter presents the most common approaches used in interaction analysis, while it particularly emphasizes recent innovative efforts to reap the advantages of machine learning techniques in order to overcome common shortcomings of previous approaches.

When applying a Collaborative Learning Flow Pattern (CLFP) to structure sequences of activities in real contexts, one of the tasks is to organize groups of students according to the constraints imposed by the pattern. Sometimes, unexpected events occurring at runtime force this pre-defined distribution to be changed. In such situations, an adjustment of the group structures to be adapted to the new context is needed. If the collaborative pattern is complex, this group re-definition might be difficult and time consuming to be carried out in real time. In this context, technology can help on notifying the teacher which incompatibilities between the actual context and the constraints imposed by the pattern. This chapter presents a flexible solution for supporting teachers in the group organization profiting from the intrinsic constraints defined by a CLFPs codified in IMS Learning Design. A prototype of a web-based tool for the TAPPS and Jigsaw CLFPs and the preliminary results of a controlled user study are also presented as a first step towards flexible technological systems to support grouping tasks in this context.

The collaborative ontology is a research domain linked to concepts of "extended cognitive context" and knowledge building in co-participation. The result of a survey about the main ontology engineering methodologies and ontology authoring tools, not only witnesses the fact that collaborative ontology authoring fortifies the process of ontology engineering, but also indicates that the collaborative ontology development and harmonization  is not well supported by any of the existing ontology authoring tools or environments.  These tools do not  use a relevant pedagogical collaborative frame, as a collaborative writing approach for shaping the design features of cooperative building. Also the process of ontology building does not take into account what we can call  “rich tagging”, that is the extraction of ontologies maturing through text produced and shared at a networking layer. In this proposition we present a cscl driven “ontology design model”. In this model, the ontology building process is maintained and validated by the encounter of 1) top-down level, where the collaborative writing scripts directs the development of authoring tools for the collaborative ontologies design and 2) bottom-up level, where the collective learning spaces such as forums and wikies, revisited by a semantic structure, are functional to the ontology extraction and validation in the learning experience.

Several studies support the benefits that collaborative learning offers to students’ overall development. It has also been shown that introducing new technologies into the educational field as motivational tools improves learning. Based on the strong evidence that CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) is an effective way of learning, analysis of the quality of collaboration occurring in these kinds of processes has become an important research field. Starting from these two realities and with the aim of assessing the collaboration that occurs during an educational process involving educational video games with group activities, this paper presents a model of a Video Game Supported Collaborative Learning (VGSCL) system. By means of various models related to the learning and game processes, the quality of collaboration occurring during this process can be analyzed, and the game can be adapted to make both the play and learning experiences more enjoyable and effective.

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments facilitate the management of collaborative tasks. However, these systems do not usually provide the personalization features required to adapt the learning experience to the student needs, a drawback that can affect the collaboration objective and ultimately the learning process. Nevertheless, there have been several research approaches that have progressed on providing intelligent features to support management, tracking and evaluation tasks in collaborative settings. In particular, we propose a framework that provides adaptive collaboration support for a CSCL environment framed in an open and standards-based learning management system. Our proposal combines adaptation rules defined in IMS Learning Design specification and dynamic support through recommendations via an accessible and adaptive guidance system. A partial prototype of this approach has been implemented and a formative evaluation was carried out to guide the on-going work. The implementation offers CSCL courses following a methodology called Collaborative Logical Framework and has been run in a real world scenario at the Madrid Science Week 2009.

The popularity of computer games has lead to an increasing interest in educational games in research and development in the last decades. Educators as well as technicians are captivated of the idea of utilizing the motivational potential and the rich virtual worlds of today’s computer games. To use the full educational potential of computer games a strong personalization and adaptation to the individual needs and preferences is needed. Conventional methods of educational adaptation, however, are oftentimes not suitable in the context of games, as they may force an interruption of the game experience and thus, destroy immersion and engagement of the player. In this paper we present approaches of educational adaptation in games that allow embedding instruction into the game experience and narrative, through non-invasive assessment of knowledge and motivation, the delivery of various types of adaptive interventions, and adaptive storytelling. The outlined approaches are focus of research, development, and evaluation in the context of the European research project 80Days.

This chapter presents an innovative description of the Jigsaw collaboration method, in the form of an online, adaptive collaborative design-pattern that has been constructed taking into account adaptation techniques, within the context of open-source learning design-based environments such as LAMS. This method is described with special reference to the learning of essential issues in Computer Science and especially in the area of programming languages. These issues include an understanding of: (a) basic elements of structured programming languages, (b) the rapid evolution of the area of programming languages, (c) the learning of programming languages’ levels and techniques. The innovative description of the Jigsaw collaborative method within LAMS is based on the fact that: (a) the tasks assigned to the expert groups consist of investigation of real world scenarios and not merely the study of learning material as is usually proposed, (b) adaptive techniques are integrated with the method and (c) for the design of the collaborative learning activity, an intuitive learning design tool like LAMS is used.

In this chapter, we present an approach for recommendation of learning materials to students in an e-learning environment. Our aim is to increase the current system’s personalization capabilities for students in different scenarios making use of recommendation techniques. The recommendation is produced considering learning materials’ properties, student’s profile and the context of use. In addition, the process of recommendation is improved through students´ collaboration. In the context of this work, a learning material is a link to a Web page or a paper available on the Web and previously stored in a private repository. The process of collaboration occurs during student’s evaluations of the recommendations. These student´s evaluations are used by the system to produce new recommendations for other students. The main features of the recommendations aspects are described and some examples are also used to discuss and illustrate how to provide this personalization.

Research on collaborative learning has emphasized the need for providing flexible yet supportive tools to teachers in order to design collaborative learning tasks. In our work we present a next step in our pattern-based approach demonstrating how educators’ ideas can provide the basis for adaptation patterns which, in turn, can be expressed in IMS-LD modeling language. In this paper we present representative and selective design case studies exemplifying the implementation of the core specification of an Adaptation Pattern (Input, Rules, Model and Output) on the basis of using tools compliant to IMS-LD. We analyze what is necessary for implementing an adaptation pattern and discuss the benefits of the pattern-based approach. Finally, we highlight what issues would be important toward integrating the adaptation pattern capabilities in LD compliant tools for collaborative learning design.