Adaptive Unterstützung für Kollaboratives E-Learning

Ziel des geplanten Projektes ist es, die technologischen Voraussetzungen zu schaffen, um den fehlenden bzw. begrenzten persönlichen Kontakt zwischen Lernenden untereinander im Fernunterricht teilweise kompensieren zu können. Dadurch soll online stattfindendes kollaboratives Lernen unterstützt, verbessert und erleichtert werden. Um dies zu ermöglichen, werden im Projekt folgende Themenkreise untersucht: a) Ausrichtung der Unterstützung adaptiver Kollaboration durch (explizit modellierte) gruppendidaktische Ansätze sowie sozial Gruppenkontexte; b) Förderung spontaner ad-hoc Interaktion zwischen online arbeitenden Lernenden, und Unterstützung von kurzzeitigen strukturierten Zusammenarbeitsmodellen in synchronen Online-Lehrveranstaltungen; und c) Erleichtern von Aufbau, Aktualisierung und Austausch persönlicher Lernprofile vor einem Gruppen-Hintergrund. Zur Überprüfung und Validierung der Ergebnisse werden in dem Projekt unterstützende Softwarekomponenten entwickelt, die in eine ausgewählte Lernplattform integriert werden. Mittels dieser Plattform werden zwei Fallstudien im Kontext von durch Institutsmitarbeiter abgehaltenen Lehrveranstaltungen durchgeführt werden. Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse des Projektes werden unter anderem die entwickelten Methodologien und Softwarekomponenten darstellen, sowie eine um die angesprochenen Technologien erweiterte Version der Lernplattform, welche die angestrebten Entwicklungen im Bereich des Blended Learning umsetzen wird. Diese sowie weitere Projektergebnisse werden der Öffentlichkeit frei zugänglich gemacht.

Technological advances and evolving social circumstances have rendered e-learning an increasingly attractive and prosperous form of knowledge acquisition in recent years. However, the benefits of flexible, online, distance learning are in danger of being outweighed by the disadvantages resulting from reduced opportunities for group- oriented and collaborative learning. The FWF-funded project "Adaptive Support for Collaborative e-Learning" (ASCOLLA) set out to develop the necessary methodologies and a set of accompanying tools for employing adaptivity as a means of providing online learners with comparable opportunities for effective collaboration with their peers as those afforded by the traditional classroom settings. Towards this goal, ASCOLLA has addressed several interconnecting dimensions of online collaborative e-learning. To start with, ASCOLLA has developed novel approaches for monitoring and interpreting the activities of learners, both as individuals and as members of groups. These approaches range from the detailed observation of user interaction with learning content within hypermedia pages, all the way to the automatic identification of behavioural patterns within sequences of actions. They have thus enabled the modelling of learners (and groups of them) with levels of precision that were not possible with then existing means. One of the ways in which these learner models can be used, and another area of work in ASCOLLA, was to enable learners to: (a) identify peers that are appropriate partners for short- or longer- term group work; and, (b) receive filtered, personalized views over interesting learning resources available to them, and the actions of other learners on these resources. Another area of work in ASCOLLA was adaptive support in the formation of learning groups. This was approached both from the perspective of providing learners with sufficient information and opportunities to engage in self- initiated, ad-hoc collaboration online, and from the perspective of an automated process that, using strategies (e.g., didactic ones) and other constraints selected by the instructor, decides how to group learners together. Lastly, the ASCOLLA project has done extensive work towards a formal specification that supports the "orchestration" of adaptively supported collaborative learning activities. This specification (which is a substantial extension of an existing industry standard), is intended for implementation within Learning Management Systems, and acts as an "umbrella" for existing learning / collaboration tools and services, as well as for didactic approaches and collaboration software that became possible thanks to the project`s innovations.