Dynamic Group Formation as an Approach to Collaborative Learning Support

Abstract

In the current time of globalization, collaboration among people in virtual environments is becoming an important precondition of success. This trend is reflected also in the educational domain where students collaborate in various short-term groups created repetitively but changing in each round (e.g. in MOOCs). Students in these kind of dynamic groups quite often encounter various difficulties, which are obvious mainly when students' characteristics do not complement each other. In spite of various group formation methods aimed to solve the group compatibility problem, most of the existing approaches do not consider dynamic groups. We describe (i) a proposal of a novel group formation method based on Group Technology approach, which considers feedback on students' collaboration to improve group formations; (ii) an application of the method as a part of a collaborative platform PopCorm, which provides students in the created groups with a set of real-time collaboration tools; (iii) a long-term experiment in which the groups created by our method achieved significantly better results in comparison with the reference approaches. Our results indicate that considering feedback from students' collaboration can improve the group formation process as the groups created by our method achieved higher collaboration quality with next iterations.

Group Formation Techniques in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

“…It has been upgraded from the individual learning paradigm to collaborative learning where learners can gain more knowledge and skills through learning together from the same learning situation Matazi et al (2014); Resta and Laferrière (2007); Srba and Bielikova (2015); Stahl et al (2006).…”

“…Collaborative learning is performed through face to face conversations and meetings or online using computer tools and frameworks Dillenbourg (1999); Resta and Laferrière (2007); Stahl et al (2006) such as computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) Matazi et al (2014); Rowe et al (2010); Srba and Bielikova (2015); Stahl et al (2006). CSCL is a pedagogical approach that uses networking technologies to aid the social and instructional interaction among learners in small groups and learning communities Resta and Laferrière (2007); Rowe et al (2010); Stahl et al (2006).…”

“…Forming a group that collaboratively learns is one of the most challenging tasks in CSCLs context which is attracting the interest of several researchers Amara et al (2016); Khandaker et al (2006); Srba and Bielikova (2015). Many articles were discussing group formation from different aspects.…”

Mapeamento Sistemático na Literatura Acadêmico-Científica sobre Abordagens para Formação de Grupos em E-Learning

“…A maioria dos trabalhos, sendo eles 42%, apresenta um método para formação de grupos baseado no contexto da interação dos estudantes em atividades colaborativas [33,42,40,18,22,16,23,19,30,24,37,28]. Em seguida, 34% dos trabalhos têm foco em otimização de algoritmos para formar os grupos [21,39,34,41,26,43,35,32,27,15].…”

“…Verificou-se que 45% dos trabalhos propõem tipos de grupos como heterogêneos em relação aos dados do perfil do aluno, tais como a turma, a região em que se encontra, o gênero, o tipo de personalidade ou o nível de habilidade, como por exemplo a habilidade com programação [33,21,36,34,41,43,35,28,16,22,24,29,37]. Em seguida, tem-se 28% que considera o tipo de grupo heterogêneo e homogêneo por desempenho em atividade de colaboração, obtido pelo nível de interação entre os estudantes [25,38,42,23,19,40,30,27]. O tipo de grupo por estilo de aprendizagem pode ser encontrado em 10% dos trabalhos analisados [20,31,17].…”