Structuring time and task in online collaboration activities: Α case study for teaching ER modeling using LAMS and Synergo

Περίληψη

The majority of existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) support collaborative learning through unstructured, general purpose collaboration workspaces that provide educators with semantically poor low-level data about learners’ interactions. Educators in turn, labour to process and interpret this kind of data, and consequently, are not able to intervene effectively in the collaboration process.
To overcome this limitation, we used Learning Activity Management System
(LAMS), an activity-based LMS, integrating in it some activities to be implemented with Synergo, a collaborative concept mapping specific tool with a structured interface. A case study of using this compound learning environment is presented in this paper.
This case study is used to investigate what will be the benefit for educators and
learners from such an approach. In this context we designed a particular collaboration script to also test the hypothesis that scripts support the acquisition of cognitive skills. A pre-test for validity and reliability of the script has been performed in order to understand and experiment with the technical’s aspects of the integration of the two elearning collaborative systems and to investigate the students’ opinions.