Techniques for fostering collaboration in online learning communities

Collaboration is, to date, extensively adopted for supporting learning processes, both in face-to-face and in virtual learning contexts. However, technology profoundly changes the nature of human interactions and, consequently, also changes the nature of the collaborative learning process, yielding a range of new potentialities and problems. "Techniques for Fostering Collaboration in Online Learning Communities: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives" provides a focused assessment of the peculiarities of online collaborative learning processes by looking at the strategies, methods, and techniques used to support and enhance debate and exchange among peers. Offering an extensive discussion of the design, management, monitoring, and evaluation of learning processes, this work reviews issues from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint and includes methodological contributions as well as perspectives on real experiences

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

Teaching in the Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment of Second Life: Design Considerations For Virtual World Developers

Educators are seeking ways to better engage their students including the use of collaborative virtual learning environments (CVLEs). Some virtual worlds can serve as CVLEs as the advent of Second Life has created particular interest within the education community. Second Life, however, was not initially designed to facilitate education alone. I propose that as a CVLE, Second Life may be failing educators' expectations of its initial, ongoing, and future use as a system for supporting education. In order to determine how Second Life may be failing educators, I conducted a case study with a group of university-level educators that examined their reasons for and against adopting Second Life as a CVLE, the affordances they explored, the barriers they encountered, and how these affordances and barriers affected student learning and the participant's future use of Second Life and future virtual worlds in education. I then compare their use of Second Life to that of traditional groupware systems. As a result, I propose and detail the development of a rich integrated development environment, application programming interface, more flexible privacy policy, and more robust community tools for educators based on these comparisons

Virtual reality and collaborative learning: a systematic literature review

Computer Systems, Imagery and Medi