Designing, Enacting & Sharing Collaborative Online Activities with CeLS

Dan Kohen-Vacs, Miky Ronen, Ronen Hammer

Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), Israel Introduction One of the declared advantages of technology for teaching and learning is its potential to support collaborative learning. The actual realization of this potential depends on the tools and facilities available to teachers for designing such activities and enacting them with students in actual instructional settings.

The first generation of e-learning systems regarded learning as an individual process mainly based on content resources. As a result, the corresponding standards developed for Learning Management Systems (LMS) focused on the organization of the resources. Additional tools for conducting free communication with the teacher and between peers (discussion group boards, chats, groupware) were provided, but these elements were not integrated with the other parts of the LMS.

Collaborative activities have existed and were successfully implemented by teachers well before the era of e-learning. These activities are not just free discussions or creating group products, but instructional strategies that comprise of well-defined structures (scripts), consisting of distinct stages that are interconnected and based on each other in various ways. Scripting is used to promote learning by structuring and regulating the interaction so that learners are compelled to follow a specific predefined sequence of activities that would have a better chance to foster the cognitive process appropriate to the learning task (Dansereau, 1988). According to Dillenbourg (2002) the definition of a script requires five attributes: the task that students have to perform, the composition of the group, the way that the task is distributed within and among groups, the mode of interaction and the timing of the phase, while in computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL), the script is reified in the interface of the learning environment. CSCL is part of an integrated learning approach that may contain face to face and other activities (not performed in front of the computer) as well as individual elements, while the whole activity is orchestrated and controlled by the teacher (Dillenbourg & Jermann, 2007). The cognitive, computational and educational perspectives of scripting computer supported collaborative learning are elaborated in a recently published book (Fischer et. al., 2007). Dillenbourg and Jermann (2007) identified seven aspects of added value brought up by the use of technology for collaboration scripts: Connecting participants enabling remote activity, Sharing spaces for collaborative actions, Management facilitating logistics aspects, Reification of the script in a dedicated interface, Scaffolding as part of the activity environment, Traceability of actions for teacher analysis and students' reflection and Adaptability of the script according to dynamical data and events.

New specifications for Instructional Management Systems based on the concept of Leaning Design (IMS-LD) have emerged (Hummel et. al., 2004). The IMS-LD engine (Coppercore) and editor (RELOAD) specify a template that enables creation of synchronized and personalized and collaborative workflow through a course. New management systems were developed according to these specifications, such as COWS (Peter & Vantroys, 2005) and Gridcole (Bote-Lorenzo, et al., 2004). An advanced approach for creation, customization and reuse of collaborative sequences of a learning activity flow is addressed by LAMS (Dalziel, 2003).

The limitations of the IMS-LD specifications for the design of environments that would enable the enactment of CSCL scripts are presented and discussed by Miao et. al. (2007). These limitations are related to the insufficient support to the modeling of groups, artifacts, dynamic features, complicated control flow and varied forms of social interaction. More specifically, when the different environments and tools used to facilitate the actions involved in a pedagogical scenario are not integrated, it is difficult to follow and to support the flow of information in order to relate to prior actions and to reuse products created by the participants in previous phases. The data flow problem of IMS-LD in collaborative learning is further described and addressed by Palomino-Ramírez et. al. (2008).

One way to cope with these challenges is to create dedicated environments that support specific types of scripts representing meaningful pedagogical methods (macro-scripts) (Dillenbourg & Jermann, 2007). The author in such environment has some control of the script's characteristics and can adjust

some of its parameters. This approach allows detailed exploration of the impact and efficacy of specific scripts but does not provide a solution for modeling and enacting a large variety of scripts.

Since pedagogical scripts and teachers' needs may be endlessly varied, a generic approach and system supporting complicated control flow and relating actions to various social structures is required, in order to allow maximal flexibility for the instructional design.

In order to address these challenges we have developed a new approach and system; Collaborative e-Learning Structures (CeLS), a web-based environment aimed to provide a flexible tool for designing, enacting, sharing and reusing online collaborative activities and incorporating them in existing instructional settings (Ronen et al., 2006; Ronen & Kohen-Vacs, 2011).

CeLS Approach to Activity Design An activity designed in CeLS may include any number of stages. A stage comprises of a combination of basic building blocks, while each building block generates a certain type of interface in the student's environment. The environment includes five types of building blocks (Figure 1):

• Presentation objects create passive presentations of information (text, links, media). This information can be provided by the teacher or consist of learners' products from previous stages. A product can be an organized collection of items contributed by individual participants (identified or anonymous) or a single item that results from a collaborative action of a group (for instance a shared document).

• Input objects create interfaces that allow participants to submit new data to the system as individual or as group artifacts. Inputs may include: text, hyperlinks, media, attached files, voting on various scales, replies to questionnaires or rubrics and shared documents.

• Interaction objects create interfaces that allow participants to interact with individual or group products submitted in previous stages, in various ways: by commenting, grading, ranking, and categorizing via text or graphic manipulations.

• Communication objects create interfaces that allow participants to freely communicate with each other and with the teacher, by a synchronous discussion board.

• Operational objects do not affect the student's interface. They provide the ability to group participants according to different criteria based on their inputs and actions.

An activity stage can consist of any combination of objects of various types. The functionality is determined by attributing properties related to groups, to the stage or to specific objects.

Figure 1: Schematics of a CeLS Activity Structure.

The special feature in the CeLS approach is the ability to control the data flow in order to selectively reuse learners' inputs and products from previous stages and to relate actions on these products to different social requirements. The social aspects are the key for controlling the data flow within an activity. Each building block can be assigned with particular Social Settings that determine what

information would be presented or which artifacts would be offered for interaction to each participant. The Social Settings may use predefined Social Structures (groups and roles in groups) that represent the characteristics of students' grouping. Since the functionality of a script is determined by attributing social properties to the script's building blocks, different participants may encounter different information, perform actions on different data items, or perform different actions, during the same activity stage. This approach enables the design and implementation of adaptation patterns (Ronen & Kohen-Vacs, 2009).

Our recent efforts focus on incorporating mobile elements in order to support the design and enactment of learning scenarios that include outdoor activities (Milrad et. al., 2011).

CeLS is an independent environment though it can be interfaced with other systems that support aspects of learning design, such as MoCoLaDe to expand the potential offered for modeling and enacting pedagogical scenarios (Harrer et al., 2009).

CeLS as a Tool for Practicing and Exploring Learning Design CeLS was designed to encourage and support teachers to incorporate online collaborative activities into their daily practice by providing them with a flexible tool and examples that they can explore, adopt and adapt. Teachers can express their pedagogical creativity and design new activities composed from basic building blocks. CeLS is used by teachers at all levels (elementary school to higher education) in variety of subject domains: education, psychology, science, technology, medical professions and arts (Abrahamov & Ronen, 2008; Kali & Ronen, 2008; Hammer et al., 2010). The early adopters are teachers, at all levels and subjects, who are already trying to use the available technology for conducting collaborative activities in their courses. CeLS enables them to design and implement activities that were very difficult or impossible to handle before.

CeLS offers a tool for conducting empirical research on the pedagogical efficacy of different types and versions of activities and for exploring how teachers design and incorporate online collaborative activities in their daily practice (Ronen & Kohen-Vacs, 2011).

Proposed Workshop Activities (day 2): 1. Hands-on experience

• A sample experience as "Students".

• Short introduction of the environment and the Activity Design options.

• Participants will be challenged to propose and design their own activities.

2. Pedagogical Aspects

• Teachers as designers of collaborative activities.

• The challenges of sharing, reusing and adapting activity designs.

3. Technological aspects:

Explore possibilities of interfacing CeLS with other tools and systems addressing various aspects of Learning Design.

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