The practice of CSCL in engineering education within the research on TEL

Abstract

The practice of the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) requires to solve not only the specific collaborative interactions of teachers and students, but also an additional design of the supporting IT background infrastructure for this kind of teaching. Because the practice of collaborative learning points to “collaboration” between the teacher and students, the didactics aspects (pedagogical methodologies), and informatics aspects (the supporting IT infrastructure) are more important in comparison with the traditional teaching and learning. In other words, the role of a teacher is essential in terms of both the design of the collaborative learning methodology and the tailor made informatics infrastructure. A feedback and communication is especially important when solving CSCL. In the actual scientific papers there is relatively little focus on the research on teacher's role in the collaborative learning. The intentions of this contribution is to give an added-value to this research just from a position of a teacher who is moreover researcher and designer of the educational technology in one person. In this context, various didactic and informatics issues of the CSCL were solved within the research on technology-enhanced learning (TEL). When computerizing teaching and learning processes in teaching bachelors students, the most difficult problem is to create a suitable informatics collaborative platform for transmission and sharing information and knowledge between teacher and students. For this purpose, a concept of virtual knowledge unit was formulated, as well, a batch knowledge processing paradigm and in-house software were developed. This enables the teacher to solve different CSCL — issues on his personalized level, as is it demonstrated in this paper.