Learning Goals and Design Rationales in Collaborative Learning An Ontological Approach to Support Design of Collaborative Learning

Many of software designers of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environment have been suffering with complex and subtle educational requirements offered by clients. One of major causes of the problem they face is the lack of shared understanding of collaborative learning. We do not know what design rationale of CSCL environment is and even do not have common vocabulary to describe what the collaborative learning is. In this research we are aiming at supporting such complex instructional design process of CSCL environment. To fulfill the aim we have been constructing an ontology to represent CSCL session. Advantages of collaborative learning over individual learning are investigated in different research areas: Social psychology, Pedagogy, Sociology, Educational psychology, Cognitive Science and so on. We call these research findings “Learning Theories”. The learning theories seem to be useful as the design rationales of CSCL sessions; however, it is difficult to understand them for persons who are not experts in the domain. Due to the diversity of the research area, no one can understand all theories and apply them appropriately. So, we have built Collaborative Learning Ontology and formulated CSCL models in terms of the ontology. [6, 7, 8, 9, 16] With the ontology, we can represent many kinds of CSCL sessions in terms of common vocabulary. We adopt learning theories as foundation to represent, analyze, design, and develop the learning sessions. In this poster, we show some vocabulary and design patterns concerned with learning goals and learning groups based on our Collaborative Learning Ontology. We have extracted common features of phenomena, which are development of learning community, interaction among learners and educational benefits for a learner, from the learning theories. The learning theories account for such phenomena, and a designer or a learner can regard the phenomena as goals. So, we use the term “learning goal” to represent such phenomena. Namely, we call the goal of development of learning community W(L)-goal, the goal of group’s activity W(A)-goal, the goal of interaction among learners Y<=I-goal, and the goal of educational benefits for a learner I-goal.