Mining students activities from a computer supported collaborative learning system based on peer to peer network

Abstract

As Information & Communication Technology (ICT) is rapidly evolved, educational paradigms have been changing. The ultimate goal of education with the aid of ICT is to provide customized training for learners to improve the effectiveness of their learning at anytime and anywhere. In the online learning environment where the Internet, mobile devices, peer-to-peer (P2P) and the cloud technology are leveraged, all the information in learning activities is converted into digital data and stored in the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) system. The data in the CSCL system contains various learners’ information including the learning objectives, learning preferences, competences and achievements. Thus, by analyzing the activity information of learners in an online CSCL system, meaningful and useful information can be extracted and provided for learners, teachers and administrators as feedback. In this paper, we propose a learner activity model that represents the learner’s activity information stored in a CSCL system. As for the proposed learner activity model, we classified the learning activities in a CSCL system into three categories: vivacity, learning and relationship; then we created quotients to represent them accordingly. In addition, we developed a CSCL System, which we termed as COLLA, applied the proposed learner activity model and analyzed the results.