This paper presents heuristics for designing online, different time and place, collaborative learning environments to foster feelings of cohesion in a small group. Without cohesion, the basis for collaboration is limited: some degree of cohesion in the group is necessary for a productive collaboration. The heuristics are developed from the literature on collaborative learning and cohesion. The paper presents three iterations of custom-built learning technology that follows the design-based research (DBR) methodology. DBR aims to bridge the gap between education research and practice, allowing researchers to observe social interaction in naturalistic settings. Each iteration of the technology represents a different configuration of applying the heuristics. By exploring the heuristics through these applications, one can further develop the theory behind how cohesion emerges for online learning groups.

This paper focuses on the pattern of engagement of students collaborating in a virtual environment. Students work different time and place to develop responses to three homework assignments in a collaborative online learning environment. For each assignment, students are asked to cognitively engineer a technology-mediated collaboration in which they must consider issues such as communication, shared workspaces, online communities, and so on. Because of the “distance” between peer collaborators introduced by the virtual environment, the question of engagement becomes more complex. An analysis of the interactions of students in the virtual space is presented. The students exhibit a shift toward putting more effort into the revision stage of the assignment where they have access to the work of their peers. The data shows that students trend toward becoming more engaged from the first assignment to the last. The analysis illuminates changing patterns of engagement which gives insight as to how to improve student engagement in virtual, different time and place collaborations.

An apprenticeship community is an approach to linking two very hard problems: dissemination of technology-mediated learning methods and improvements to the preparation of undergraduates for a STEM workforce. A standard computer science curriculum based on knowledge and skill acquisition augmented with a project-based student community of design/builders is a significant addition to current methods for educating students and preparing them for a STEM-based workforce. An ecosystem can be developed that leverages the work of undergraduates as a mechanism to face-lift the technology-base of the classroom. Custom-building education platforms is a necessary and significant complementary approach to generic platforms as a method for propagating technology-mediated pedagogy. This project creates a how-to model for converting institutional need into opportunity for a community of learners.

We present a new tool to help students make use of video recordings of traditional chalkboard and whiteboard lectures. Our tool provides a compact summary of a chalkboard lecture in the form of a set of slides, and an interactive environment for electronic note-taking in real time while watching a lecture in class or during review. Key to the processing of a chalkboard video by our system is the removal of the lecturer from the video (now no longer present to occlude the board) and segmentation of the resulting video to produce a set of slides comprising a compact presentation of the content written on the board during the lecture. Our method enhances learning in a number of ways. Students can focus on taking notes to supplement the material, rather than rote transcription. In addition, notes are aligned temporally with the lecture video and thus provide a useful way for students to index into the important parts of the video. Our system can be easily integrated into courses with a recorded lecture video component to help students organize their notes and quickly navigate the lectures from a given course for particular topics.

A positive peer learning collaboration is one where each participant engages with their partner's point of view. The negotiations that result from such engagements are the key to a productive collaborative learning experience. This paper presents a framework for in-class programming exercises done by dyads of students whose activity was mediated by an online learning platform. To maximize the amount of positive collaboration that occurs, it is crucial to consider the design of the interaction. The overall structure of the interaction for the platform described in this paper follows the think-pair-share (TPS) paradigm. The focus of the design is on the pair stage, which is where the heart of the collaboration lies. A model is developed of the progress of interaction during this stage, which is used to explain the data collected from a study of dyads of students engaged in problem-solving activities for short periods of time. A microgenetic analysis shows that students actively engage in collaboration through considering, comparing, and negotiating alternate viewpoints for a given exercise.

Computer workers are in constant tension between meeting their deadlines and learning the tools they use to perform their jobs. Most often, the press to get work down overrides the importance of how to continually use the tool, and thereby improving performance over the long run. The lack of knowledge, however, results in constant interruptions to the workflow as the engineer tries to “bend” the tool to meet their tasks. This paper presents a method to convert these workflow interruptions into targeted opportunities for training that can be leveraged through the use of an inline trainer. An inline trainer is a tool that works in parallel with the main application to promote continuous learning through the introduction of small amounts of information that over time lead to a richer understanding of an application. Data is presented demonstrating that when provided with an inline trainer, users will leverage the tool to improve their daily work, making more productive use of already occurring interruptions.

What is the right mix of individual and collaborative learning? This position paper will explore how online platforms can mix the two approaches, addressing problems inherent to each while increasing the learning. Approaches to collaborative learning can be differentiated by the type of coordination that is required, either tight or loose (Alterman and Larusson, 2013). Tightly coordinated learning tends to be more collaborative and loosely coordinated activities have more of an individual orientation. Modifying platforms of either extreme can achieve better balance between the individual and collaborative features of a learning activity. Heuristics are presented that support these kinds of transformations; blog and wiki-based platforms are used to ground the discussion. Also considered is the sequence of learning and how mixed platforms better prepare students for future learning.

Promoting blog content is a social activity; it is a means of communicating one student's appreciation of another student's work. This paper explores the feasibility of using student promotions of content, in a blogosphere, to identify quality content, and implications for instructors. We show that students actively and voluntarily promote content, use promotion data to select which posts to read, and with considerable accuracy identify quality material. We explore the benefits of knowing which students are good and poor predictors of quality content, and what instructors can do with this information in terms of feedback and guidance.

Monitoring student progress in homework is important but difficult to do. The work in this paper presents a method for monitoring student progress based on their participation. By tracking participation we can successfully create a model that predicts, with very high accuracy, if a student is going to score a low grade on her current assignment before it is completed, thus enabling selective interventions.

We describe an approach to building adaptive groupware systems. This approach encompasses a methodology that reduces the complexity of inferring user intent by identifying a domain-specific interface language that both supports the user's maintenance of common ground, and can be used to drive an adaptive component.Our approach can be framed as follows: 1) Users of same-time different-place collaborative systems must exchange certain types coordination specific information; 2) We can facilitate the exchange and management of this information by introducing special purpose interface components, which we call Coordinating Representations, that structure these communications; 3) Information that is collected through these interface components is particularly well suited to driving intent inferencing procedures; and 4) Intent inference can be used to drive adaptive components that support the collaborative activity.We discuss empirical results from two experiments that validate this methodology.