Helping the tutor to manage a collaborative task in a web-based learning environment

Collaborative learning environments are mainly based on constructivist instructional design theories where students construct their own knowledge by interacting with their environment. The so-called virtual communities constitute and approach that facilitates the constructivist learning within these environments. In this context, the learning process consists of authentic participation in the activities of the community in a level appropriate to the student’s current competency. Nevertheless, due to the great amount of students in web-based courses, it is necessary to help the tutor to correctly design and manage the collaborative activities in the learning community. Furthermore, the tutor should be provided with certain information about how the collaboration is performing in the collaborative activity in order to detect potential problematic situations. In this paper we propose a scenario for a collaborative task to be carried out in a web-based collaborative learning environment. This scenario can be supported by intelligent learning management systems and applied in a variety of domains. The collaborative task described here can be used to build a collaboration model from students’ interactions, which can help the tutor to manage the collaboration activity itself. This task is being implemented on a web-based collaborative environment called aLF through user modelling based on a machine learning multiagent approach.