Supporting discourse in a synchronous learning environment: the learning protocol approach

Synchronous discussions in distributed computer-supported learning environments are usually conducted employing chat tools. Lack of coordination and coherence among the contributions is a typical problem with chat. In this paper, we propose to apply learning protocols to increase coordination, coherence, and as a consequence the efficiency of learning. Learning protocols are system controlled cooperation scripts, which impose constraints on the learning discourse: Participants explicitely identify the reference of their contributions as well as the type of contribution; furthermore, the order of contributions is predetermined. Learning protocols can be defined with respect to a variety of typical discourse situations, such as giving an explanation, or summarizing text. We describe two learning protocols and present empirical results which confirm the hypothesis that structured discourse leads to superior learning compared to unstructured chat.