COLearn: Supporting Collaborative Learning on top of Existing Learning Infrastructures

COLearn is a web-based collaborative learning environment that supports the specification of collaborative learning workflows, their deployment and enactment. It addresses major challenges in modern learning infrastructures to enable contextualization, social constructivism and knowledge-pull. It offers a shell, easily integrated on top of existing open learning infrastructures (such as LMSs and OER repositories) to enrich their capabilities by offering functionality to design rich collaborative learning activities. COLearn run-time environment is used to enact these activities and workflows. This way, COLearn leverages the power of the underlying infrastructures, provides structure to the groups of learners that participate in learning workflows, dynamically adapts the workflows during their enactment, monitors their evolution to facilitate assessment and provides feedback to the learners. COLearn employs an intuitive graphical representation exploiting the Business Process Modeling Notation standard. As an internal representation and interoperability model it uses IMS Learning Design thus offering effective sharing and remixing of learning designs.