Collaborative Learning Environment Associated with Teacher-oriented Mechanism

Abstract

Today, web-based collaborative learning is one of hot topics as computer-support education environment. Many researches/developments have focused on the functionality, interactiveness, multi-media authoring, organization of environments, etc. for the investigation of collaboration facilities, but not on the subjects for managing learning processes, grasping understanding levels of participants, promoting creative discussions and so on. In this paper, we address a collaboration-support method to manage learning processes, grasp learning progress of group, promote active discussions among participants and grow up creativeness of individuals. In order to attain this method we introduce a teacher-oriented mechanism. This mechanism simulates the behavior of teacher who organizes and coordinates the group learning in our real world: the teacher monitors learning progress and contents of discussions roughly, remarks well/bad-understanding students, advises effective and successful comments/hints timely if necessary. Our idea for constructing teacher-oriented mechanism is to provide two different means: resolution derivation scenario and answering path. The resolution derivation scenario is useful to detect and resolve impasse situation in which answering process does not progress, while the answering path is powerful to promote discussion of various methods for deriving answer.