Encouragement of Collaborative Learning Based on Dynamic Groups

We propose a method for creating different types of study groups with aim to support effective collaboration during learning. We concentrate on the small groups which solve short-term well-defined problems. The method is able to apply many types of students’ characteristics as inputs, e.g. interests, knowledge, but also their collaborative characteristics. It is based on the Group Technology approach. Students in the created groups are able to communicate and collaborate with the help of several collaborative tools in a collaborative platform called PopCorm which allows us to automatically observe dynamic aspects of the created groups. The results of these observations provide a feedback to the method for creating groups. In the long term experiment groups created by our method achieved significantly better results in the comparison with the reference method (k-means clustering).