Facilitating Collaborative Learning in Virtual (and Sometimes Mobile) Environments

Abstract

Enrollment for online learning and virtual campuses is increasing in secondary education and higher education as educational institutions cope with an increased demand for specialized and asynchronous educational curricula. Our preliminary investigation shows approximately 50% of virtual groups formed online for the purpose of collaborative learning will encounter barriers that prevent them from forming an effective learning team. Our ongoing research is designed to identify the barriers that stand in the way of online learning groups in order to develop and test various intervention techniques, which can effectively remove the obstacles. Our secondary goal is to analyze the conversations of virtual group members using computational linguistics techniques and to develop a learning activity discourse model. The model is being used to construct an automatic system, which can be used to monitor the activities of the online learning group members to alert the instructors when the members encounter barriers.