Towards an on-Line Student Assistant within a CSCL Framework

Fernando Ramos-Quintana, M. Dolores Vargas-Cerdán, J. Rafael Rojano-Cáceres

Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Cuernavaca Autopista del Sol, Xochitepec, Morelos, México.

DOI: 10.4236/ce.2012.35093                

Abstract

The CSCL framework of this work aims at reinforcing knowledge by rebuilding and representing it synthetically in form of a network of concepts, which is built through exchanged messages using a chat and a graphical tool. We have found that during the collaborative learning sessions important troubles bring about deadlocks affecting the learning process. The hypothesis of this work states that significant troubles are expressed by students in form of assistance requests originating behavior patterns associated with certain phases defined within the collaborative learning sessions. Analysis of dialogs of real collaborative learning sessions confirmed this hypothesis, whose results point towards the development of on-line assistance system that aims at breaking the deadlocks caused by troubles expressed in the form of assistance requests. Derived from an analysis of 55 dialogs of a course of databases, we defined three phases characterized by particular assistance requests occurring during the collaborative learning sessions: a) a bootstrap phase characterized by requests about doubts of the use of tools; b) a work phase, wherein requests are related with the construction of the network concepts; c) the goodbye phase wherein requests reflect doubts about the final deliverable network.

Keywords

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning; Dialogues; Behavior Patterns

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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