Abstract
Over the past years the concept of role in distance education has become a promising construct for analysing and facilitating collaborative processes and outcomes. Designing effective collaborative learning processes is a complex task that can be supported by existing good practices formulated as pedagogical patterns or scripts. Over the past years, the research on technology enhanced learning has shown that collaborative scripts for learning act as mediating artefacts not only designing educational scenarios but also structuring and prescribing roles and activities. Conversely, existing learning systems are not able to provide dynamic role management in the definition and execution of collaborative scripts. This work proposes the application of Social Network Analysis in order to evaluate the expertise level of a learner when he/she is acting, with an assigned role, within the execution of a collaborative script. Semantic extensions to both IMS Learning Design and Information Packaging specifications are also proposed to support roles management.
Highlights
The research field on Technology Enhanced Education (TEE) suggests that the collaborative dimension is one of the most important factors to take into account when trying to ensure a high level of sustainability of e-learning
The second main objective of the work is to support the role binding by means of an automatic tool able to suggest the most suitable user for a given role. These suggestions are generated by using a combination of SNA and CNA algorithms which can be applied on the data coming from previous collaboration sessions. In line with these considerations, this work proposes: (i) the extension of existing learner profiles specifications in order to add information about expertise levels the learners manifest while playing specific roles within the execution of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) scripts, so to support automatic assignment of roles to learners improving the setting of collaborative groups; (ii) the extension of an existing learning design language (i.e. IMS Learning Design) to support role-based scripts; (iii) a method based on Social Network Analysis (SNA) able to evaluate the aforementioned expertise levels by analysing learners’ interactions during CSCL scripts execution and the subsequent updating of learner profiles
We propose the application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques to evaluate the learners playing roles within collaborative environments in the context of a CSCL script described using IMS Learning Design1 (IMS-Learning Design (LD))
Summary
The research field on Technology Enhanced Education (TEE) suggests that the collaborative dimension is one of the most important factors to take into account when trying to ensure a high level of sustainability of e-learning. Learners manifest while playing specific roles within the execution of CSCL scripts, so to support automatic assignment of roles to learners improving the setting of collaborative groups; (ii) the extension of an existing learning design language (i.e. IMS Learning Design) to support role-based scripts; (iii) a method based on Social Network Analysis (SNA) able to evaluate the aforementioned expertise levels by analysing learners’ interactions during CSCL scripts execution and the subsequent updating of learner profiles. To achieve this aim, first of all the paper describes the background and motivations of this work and its contributions. The paper presents some conclusions and suggests some future works
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