Reveal the collaboration in a open learning environment

Abstract

The management and characterization of collaboration to improve students' learning is still an open issue, which needs standardized models and inferring methods for effective collaboration indicators, especially when online courses are based on open approaches where students are not following CSCL scripts. We have supplied our students with a scrutable (manageable and understandable) web application that shows an ontology, which includes collaborative features. The ontology structures collaboration context information, which has been obtained form explicit (based on questionnaires) and implicit methods (supported by several machine learning techniques). From two consecutive years of experiences with hundreds of students we researched students' interactions to find implicit methods to identify and characterize students' collaboration. Based on the outcomes of our experiments we claim that showing useful and structured information to students and tutors about students' collaborative features can have a twofold beneficial impact on students learning and on the management of their collaboration. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.