Fostering team-role balance in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

ROSANNA COSTAGUTA; SILVIA SCHIAFFINO; RUBEN ESTEBAN FARES

New Horizons in Creative Open Software, Multimedia, Human Factors and Software Engineering

Blue Herons

Año: 2012; p. 82 - 90

The concept of team in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning is very important, however, organizing students in groups or teams does not guarantee their learning. The behaviors that students show while solving a collaborative task, that is, the roles they play, are vital to reach teaching and learning goals successfully. On the other hand, although the behaviors or roles of an individual in a team can be infinite, the range of useful behaviors that make a real contribution to the team is finite, and only when an adequate balance of roles is achieved within a group, this group will carry out tasks in a coordinate fashion. In this chapter, we present a multi-agent model that monitors students´ participation in a group, recognizes their team roles as they work collaboratively, diagnoses the state of the collaboration considering balance of team roles as an ideal situation, and then proposes corrective actions when the group behavior is far from this ideal. Currently, the proposed model is under development in an e-learning environment, and will be soon validated with real user experiences.