CLAS: a Collaborative learning awareness system

By interacting with the environment, a person generates a multitude of signals. In the case of collaborative learning, these signals allowed a learner to have some knowledge of the actions and the intentions of his colleagues. The knowledge of others, which is resulting from his interaction with the environment, is often mentioned in literature by the term awareness’. The latter can be translated in this context by be aware’ or be aware of what’ it happens. The awareness allows both learners to adjust and plan their behavior based on what they know each other. In this paper, we present CLAS, a collaborative learning system that takes into account the “awareness process”. For doing this, it provides its learners with a set of tools that facilitate the visualization of the traces of their teammates. These learners are grouped into small groups. These social groups can contain four learners at most. This work is a part of research project supported by Guelma University. The task dedicated to our team is to study the impacts of “group awareness” on the instructional level of learners. In other words, the aim is to study the effects of showing all the traces (i.e. actions) of learners by theirs peers. This visualization can be synchronous or asynchronous. In order to facilitate this task, several tools are provided to each learner. These tools are used for supporting the visualization of information about the actions of the other learners belonging to the same group. Some indicators can be calculated from these actions. Most of these indicators are taken from the Social Network Analysis (SNA). Among these indicators, we can cite task realization percentage, percentage of contribution of each group member in global task, cohesion degree, etc. At the end of the paper, we present some screen-shots of CLAS (Collaborative Learning Awareness System), which was implemented at computer science department of Guelma University.