Communications of the ACM
Researcher Explores Student Online Collaboration
Credit: Mindflash
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) and Carnegie Mellon University are using a U.S. National Science Foundation grant to study blended learning in which online and traditional components are used together in instruction. "We hope that this project will contribute to higher quality collaborative environments for students in online and blended learning environments," says PSU senior researcher Marcela Borge.
The three-year project will "merge what we know from the fields of human-computer interaction, the learning sciences, and computational linguistics to support an online collaborative learning environment," Borge says. The researchers will create a collaborative environment that will be able to analyze student posts and evaluate their ability to plan, build on ideas, assess ideas, and make progress. Embedded agents will offer suggestions in the chat environment for students to use specific strategies, for example.
Instructors will be able to turn features on and off and monitor team interaction. The researchers also will study which types of prompts and feedback are the most successful. "The goal is to develop a system that can be used to support collaborative learning in any educational context," Borge says. "This poses many challenges, but we are confident that our team can come up with innovative solutions."
From Penn State News
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