Status of research on collaboration in Virtual Learning Environments

Abstract

Collaborative learning has a broad theoretical and practical tradition in general education, as in higher education. However, coordination of people who seek to learn is not an easy task to manage. This complexity increases when technology arises as component of collaboration. What are the advances on technology-assisted collaborative learning? This work aims to analyze the state of the research on collaborative learning in Higher Education in Virtual Learning Environments (EVA). To achieve this purpose, a bibliometric analysis of the indexed publications of the SCOPUS database is carried out. Network bibliometric analyses revealed that the scientific production on collaborative learning in higher education is grow-ing but not homogeneous over time. Most active disciplines proved to be Social Sciences and Computer Scienc-es, and a special emphasis on understanding the Collaboration in b-learning environments showed two developing trends: 1) the acceptance of virtual collaborative media-tion in higher education processes and 2) the need to implement collaborative methodological nuances (portfolio and other pedagogical alternatives) and trying out other virtual tools (social networks).