Abstract:

It is well known that collaborative learning could foster the development of students’ problem solving, critical thinking, and argumentative skills. However, free collaboration may not produce meaningful learning if not explicitly proposed. This is true in particular within computer-based environments, where learning activities need to be properly designed and structured. To this aim, collaborative scripts, i.e. externally imposed structures which establish participants’ role and actions and regulate groups’ interactions (King, 2007), might be useful. According to a Vygotskian perspective, a script is effective from an educational point of view if it is first socialized and then internalized by students. In this regard, we named Vygotskian Computer Based Learning Activities (VCBLAs), educational activities designed through collaborative computer-based scripts, in order to promote students’ mathematical skills.

A VCBLA is implemented on Moodle platform and it includes a narrative flow and the use of collaboration tools. Depending on the role and actions to be performed, the user (student or teacher) may have multiple communication channels (and therefore multiple chat-rooms) available.The simultaneous view of the narrative flow and the communication channels are necessary to allow the user to efficiently experience the activity. However, Moodle does not yet offer this feature, and the user is forced to manage multiple browser windows separately and constantly switch among them in order to carry on the educational activity. In this way, learning may be hindered since the student’s cognitive load could be mainly focused on managing the platform rather than the educational activity. Also the teacher might have difficulties in supervising, mediating and handling the whole learning path.

In this work, we attempt to overcome the above mentioned limitations. We developed a Moodle plugin prototype to implement a user-friendly interface for VCBLAs. The prototype allows the user to visualize, in a single browser window, a dashboard which includes both the course contents and the chats, available according to the roles and actions assigned within the collaborative script. Once the plugin is activated, the browser window is split into two parts: the left part shows course contents and, therefore, the narrative flow; the right part shows all the chats in single frames. From an implementation point of view, all chats are independent from each other and the user can consult them and send messages separately. The chats are constantly updated, and the last message is displayed in the chat frame in order to make users’ interactions as efficient as possible.

References:
[1] King, A. (2007). Scripting collaborative learning processes: A cognitive perspective. In: F. Fischer, I. Kollar, H. Mandl, & J. Haake (eds.), Scripting computer-supported collaborative learning: Cognitive, computational and educational perspectives (pp. 13-37), New York: Springer, 2007.

Keywords:

Mathematics education, e-learning, user-friendly interface, collaborative scripts, user experience.