A behaviour awareness mechanism to support collaborative learning

Abstract

Awareness has been identified as a key element that affects the quality of collaboration. Several studies indicate that awareness mechanisms to support collaborative learning activities should include factors and stimuli from the students’ context and social interactions. This contributes to enhance the collaboration process and the learning experience of the students. This paper proposes a behaviour awareness mechanism to support collaborative learning in undergraduate learning scenarios. This mechanism has been designed to provide personal and social awareness to students about both, their own and their peers learning behaviour. Moreover, this mechanism encourages reflection and promotes social interactions among students in order to improve the effectiveness of collaborative learning. The article also describes and evaluates a prototype of the proposed mechanism and its implementation in a collaborative mobile learning application, using a case study. The preliminary results show that this proposal helps promote collaborative learning in undergraduate learning contexts.