Supporting and Guiding Learners’ Collaboration through a Structured Adaptive Communication Tool

This paper presents a web-based synchronous adaptive communication tool, referred to as ACT, which supports and guides learners’ communication/collaboration by adopting the structured form of the dialogue and utilizing as “communication-scaffolding” tools both sentence openers and communication acts. The ACT tool adapts the provided set of the “communication-scaffolding” tools according to the cognitive skills addressed by the learning activity, the model of collaboration followed by the group members and the educational tool used for the elaboration of the activity. During their communication, learners have the possibility to enrich the predefined sets of the “communication-scaffolding” tools, to connect their messages with other already sent messages, to monitor their debate in a visual graphical representation form through the Dialogue Tree and to reflect on their communication/collaboration by accessing the results of the quantitative analysis of their contributions. The first empirical results are encouraging regarding the provided facilities.