Effects of a context awareness tool on students' cognition of their team-mates learning time in a distance learning project activity

Aiming to understand and enhance metacognition in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), we considered time management as one of students’ major challenges in CSCL. In collaborative activities, students need to know and regulate their individual and collective time being aware about their own and their team-mates expected availabilities. Aiming to understand and enhance time awareness in distance learning context we introduced a methodology for the assessment of Group Time Awareness, based on the comparison of subjective and inter-subjective students’ learning time perceptions. Assuming that enhancing awareness will help the collaborative learning process (McCarthy and Garavan, 2008) we hypothesize that group awareness could be improved by enhancing the reflexive properties of the Computer Learning Environment. For this purpose, we conducted an experimental study introducing a context-awareness tool in order to evaluate its impact on group time awareness scores.