ERIC Number: EJ1144919
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1939-1382
EISSN: N/A
Dynamic Group Formation as an Approach to Collaborative Learning Support
Srba, Ivan; Bielikova, Maria
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, v8 n2 p173-186 Apr-Jun 2015
In the current time of globalization, collaboration among people in virtual environments is becoming an important precondition of success. This trend is reflected also in the educational domain where students collaborate in various short-term groups created repetitively but changing in each round (e.g. in MOOCs). Students in these kind of dynamic groups quite often encounter various difficulties, which are obvious mainly when students' characteristics do not complement each other. In spite of various group formation methods aimed to solve the group compatibility problem, most of the existing approaches do not consider dynamic groups. We describe (i) a proposal of a novel group formation method based on Group Technology approach, which considers feedback on students' collaboration to improve group formations; (ii) an application of the method as a part of a collaborative platform PopCorm, which provides students in the created groups with a set of real-time collaboration tools; (iii) a long-term experiment in which the groups created by our method achieved significantly better results in comparison with the reference approaches. Our results indicate that considering feedback from students' collaboration can improve the group formation process as the groups created by our method achieved higher collaboration quality with next iterations.
Descriptors: Cooperative Learning, Online Courses, Group Dynamics, Feedback (Response), Models, Computer Mediated Communication, Problem Solving, Distance Education, Scaffolding (Teaching Technique), Study, Mathematical Formulas, Classification, Personality Measures, Editing, Computer Software, Statistical Analysis, Computer Science Education, Engineering Education, Foreign Countries, Qualitative Research, College Students
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Tel: 732-981-0060; Web site: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=4620076
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Slovakia
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: NEO Five Factor Inventory
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A