Supporting flexible collaborative distance learning in the CURE platform

Supporting flexible collaborative distance learning in the CURE platform Jörg M. Haake, Till Schümmer, Anja Haake, Mohamed Bourimi, Britta Landgraf FernUniversität in Hagen Computer Science VI Distributed Systems Universitätsstr. 1, D-58084 Hagen, Germany Email: joerg. haake@fernuni-hagen.de Abstract At the German Distance Learning University, five collaborative distance learning scenarios have been recently identified by students and teachers as an important future form of collaborative learning in the university s virtual learning space. An analysis of these scenarios showed a great variance between them and a need to support run-time tailoring of the respective learning environments. Since no existing learning platform addresses all the needs, the CURE collaborative learning platform was developed to support the implementation of such a variety of tailorable learning environments. CURE is based on a room concept and supports the implementation and run-time tailoring of collaborative distance learning environments for our scenarios. Initial experience indicates its applicability. 1. Introduction The FernUniversität in Hagen is the German distance learning university. Teaching at the FernUniversität includes different forms of education: courses, seminars, and different forms of practical problem solving in lab courses. Course material and accompanying individual exercises are sent to distributed students via surface mail or the Internet. Course-specific newsgroups and direct e- mail communication with professors and teaching assistants support asynchronous discussions. Students may also use the telephone to contact staff directly. In addition, students can meet tutors and other students at one of the 60 learning centers. Students primarily learn individually. It is difficult for them to find appropriate co-learners and to learn together. As a result, students feel isolated, lack practice of collaboration, and miss the motivation that teamwork and team members may provide. A survey of faculty and students did show a major interest in collaborative learning scenarios. As a result, the FernUniversität established a research project aiming at testing initially five different forms of collaborative learning in teaching practice. These five scenarios are: collaborative exercises, tutor-guided groups with collaborative exercises, virtual seminar, virtual lab, and collaborative exam preparation. During the requirements analysis, it became clear that a static learning environment would not be sufficient to meet the needs of all scenarios. While current distance learning platforms focus on providing support for special learning scenarios, such as asynchronous seminars or discussion-based courses, or synchronous lecture broadcasting or collaborative exercises, we are looking for a generic solution enabling us to compose dedicated learning environments facilitating a variety of learning scenarios. The result of our research is the CURE (Collaborative Universal Remote Education) platform, a collaborative learning platform that supports teachers and students in constructing and tailoring of collaborative learning environments. In CURE, a collaborative learning environment for a learning scenario is composed of interconnected rooms containing learning material, tools, group communication channels, and awareness information. When entering a room, a user sees the room's content and is automatically connected to the room's group via its communication channels. Through using collaborative tools embedded in the room, users can also collaboratively learn together and edit material contained in the room. Group members can tailor the learning environment on the structural level by modifying the room structure and the functionality and content of individual rooms. Privileged users (i.e. teachers) can tailor the content level by changing the structure and presentation of content pages through provision of templates. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. It begins with a presentation of five collaborative learning scenarios to be supported at our university. Next comes a requirements analysis for a collaborative learning platform supporting the above scenarios. The main body of this paper describes our approach to design and implement a collaborative learning platform called CURE. After presenting our experiences with using CURE to create several collaborative learning environments, we compare our approach with related work. Finally, we present our conclusions and future work. 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 1

2. Five Collaborative Learning Scenarios A task force at the FernUniversität Hagen, consisting of teachers, researchers and students from all schools, collected a set of collaborative learning scenarios deemed useful for facilitating distance academic learning. These scenarios were then ranked with respect to their relevance and expected practical impact. In the sequel, we will describe the first five collaborative learning scenarios selected by the university for subsequent implementation and validation in pilot courses: collaborative exercises, tutor-guided groups with collaborative exercises, virtual seminars, virtual labs, and collaborative exam preparation. Distance learning courses at Hagen normally involve assignments, which are to be submitted by individual students in regular intervals. Collaborative exercises aim at supporting a distributed group of students in synchronously solving an assignment together. Such exercises are to be prepared by the teacher of a course. To facilitate collaborative learning, the teachers must be able to structure the assignment into phases or tasks, which need to be executed by the group, potentially in a certain order. In order to perform such exercises, students need support for forming groups, negotiating dates and times for a joint session, performing joint problem solving to create a solution together, submitting the solution as a group to the correction phase, and receiving the annotated and graded solution from the correction phase. As an example consider a course on operating systems in the school of computer science. Here, students not only get individual assignments but also collaborative exercises. They must form learning groups and solve assignments jointly. E.g., a group is asked to compare two concepts by going through the following process: first brainstorm about properties of concepts, then construct a semantic net that shows their relationships, and finally compose a text comparing the concepts. Learning in this scenario happens in pure student peer-groups. Adding a facilitator leads us to the next scenario. Tutor-guided learning groups denote a scenario where groups of students work for a semester on tasks prepared by a teacher, and where teachers or tutors facilitate the learning process. While in the above scenario students form groups for each exercise, the learning groups in this scenario are closed groups, which are maintained for the whole course. Students may interact asynchronously or synchronously. As a special type of task, students may also be assigned by the tutor to work on a collaborative exercise (see above). In this case, the tutor may act as a facilitator, who helps them during synchronous collaboration. As an example, consider a mathematics course, which in addition to usual assignments also includes tutor-guided learning groups. In these groups, tutors asynchronously summarize, illustrate and discuss topics covered in the course, and complement this with synchronous demonstration of proofs or initiation of sub groups working on a collaborative exercise. During these exercises, the tutor may visit sub groups and provide help to them, as in problem based learning (PBL) [18]. In this type of learning scenario, the tutor can facilitate not only learning in the course domain (e.g. math) but also learning of computer supported collaborative learning techniques (i.e. group work skills). The virtual seminar aims at supporting traditional seminar-like work at a distance. During a semester, students are working on literature to prepare their paper on a given topic, to present it to the group, and to discuss its relationships to the other seminar topics. Here, teachers and students need support for topic assignment and selection, joint preparation of papers, coordination of papers about related topics, progress reporting to and feedback from teachers, paper presentations and subsequent discussions. Often, virtual seminars are using blended learning techniques, where asynchronous preparation and discussion phases are linked with a faceto-face presentation phase. Mostly, collaboration will proceed asynchronously and require, e.g., threaded discussions, but sometimes the need for closer and synchronous collaboration may arise, using, e.g., chat or shared whiteboards. When groups of students are assigned to the same topic, the need for supporting shared workspaces, for providing different levels of visibility of material (e.g., sub group internal, visible only for teacher, visible to whole seminar group) and access control arises. The virtual lab denotes the situation where groups of students work in closed groups on predefined experiments in the lab. In distance learning, lab access is a problem and in most domains (e.g. computer science, electronics) the required equipment may be only software or may be simulated by software. Consider the example of a database administration lab. Work in student groups may primarily be organized asynchronously (e.g., group members are assigned to different sub tasks of database administration) or synchronously (e.g., all members perform database design, testing and administration together and share the same virtual lab environment). Group formation and access to restricted lab resources (e.g. if remote-controlled hardware is needed, which is provided at a real lab in the university) may require special control by the teacher. Students may need to contact peer learners, teachers and technicians or administrators. The collaborative learning environment must not only support communication and collaboration, but also joint operation of the experimental environment. Collaborative exam preparation is based on pure student peer groups. The idea is to support students in a course to form groups preparing for the exam to be taken by each student individually. Thus, students need support for group formation (e.g. reusing appropriate exercise teams may prove useful), for maintaining a closed shared workspace (you don t want your examiner to follow your 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 2

mistakes too closely, after all, the purpose of these groups is to benefit from your peers), and for communication and joint problem solving (e.g. when the need for quick responses and shared drawing arises). Separate communication channels to tutors and teachers could be provided and used on demand (reusing elements from the tutor-guided learning groups scenario, see above). These groups form for a fixed period (i.e. until the exam is passed), but longer relationships may evolve and could be supported using similar techniques. All scenarios show a great variability in terms of group formation techniques, synchronicity, workspace structure, and when and by whom these aspects are determined. This is true for each type of learning scenario, and even more so across all five scenarios. Thus, teachers and students must be able to specialize the above generic scenarios into concrete instances meeting their needs. As needs may change during time, the concrete scenario in a course may need to be adapted at run-time by the participants. 3. Requirements Analysis In the above collaborative learning scenarios, a number of tasks reappear often. These seem to be the generic tasks to be supported by a learning platform aimed at facilitating above scenarios. For performing collaborative learning scenarios, these tasks include: Provision of a shared workspace for a (closed) group (all scenarios) (R1). Further (re)structuring of group workspaces must be supported (virtual seminar, virtual labs, and collaborative exam preparation). Access to tools for joint work (all scenarios) (R2). Provision of asynchronous and synchronous communication channels between group members (all scenarios); virtual seminars especially demand threaded discussion support (R3). If learning is to occur over a longer time period, teachers and learners must be able to structure their learning into smaller episodes (sessions). In general, it may be necessary to structure a learning assignment into a learning process consisting of steps, material, and tools associated with steps and material. Consequently, learning material needs to be structured accordingly (collaborative exercises, tutorguided groups, and virtual labs) (R4). Each scenario requires a different mix of learning episodes. Group formation (all scenarios), which supports closed (sub)groups (e.g. as a consequence of topic assignment or selection, see virtual seminar) (R5). Closed groups need support for access restrictions to guarantee privacy, if needed (R6). Scheduling of dates and times for joint sessions (all scenarios); especially access to resources may be controlled by teachers (virtual lab) (R7). Form-based input of information is needed to support standardized information collection from learners (e.g. the personal home page in a seminar, or group formation based on a table with a structure that should not be altered by learners) (R8). Tools associated with steps must support collaborative use if to be used in synchronous problem solving (collaborative exercises, tutorguided groups, and virtual labs) (R9) Submitting a solution as a group and receiving graded solution as a group (collaborative exercises, and virtual labs) (R10). In order to support collaborative learning in a course (e.g. a seminar), above blocks must be combined in a suitable way: a shared space must be created, structured for the intended groups, and populated with suitable material and tools. A form of group building must be integrated, which creates the intended type and number of groups, and assigns (sub)spaces with the correct access permissions to them. These capabilities have to be offered to both, teachers and students: For preparing collaborative learning scenarios, teachers must be able to create and maintain above configurations themselves (R11). If a learning scenario requires groups to control their own space, students must be able to create and maintain sub groups and sub spaces themselves as well. Thus, a simple way of tailoring the collaborative learning environment is needed (R12). As tailoring accommodates changing needs, restructuring of the shared workspace by teachers and students needs to be supported at run-time (R13). Finally, the learning platform should be based on Internet standards and should minimize the installation of additional software on the learner s side (R14). 4. Design of CURE In this section, we describe the conceptual design of the CURE collaborative learning platform. Section 4.1 describes the main concepts of CURE, while section 4.2 focuses on tailoring support. 4.1 Conceptual Design of CURE We develop the CURE (Collaborative Universal Remote Education) collaborative learning platform to meet the requirements identified in section 3. The key concept of CURE is the room concept [3], which serves as a shared space for a group (R1). Figure 1 illustrates the conceptual design of CURE. To build up structured learning environments, a room may be connected to adjacent rooms, thus forming a virtual learning environment represented as an acyclic directed graph of rooms. Every cooperative learning 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 3

environment is represented by a designated entry room and all rooms recursively connected to it. In fact, a whole virtual university can be constructed by creating an entry room of the university, which links to all learning environments. Since in our current implementation (cf. Section 5) a room is implemented as a web page that can be accessed via a standard web browser, the central access point to all learning material (offered by a virtual university) is a collaborative web portal (R14). Collaborative Learning Environment entry room content used by Abstract Page Room Group has has adjacent rooms has member Communication ContentPage Binary Page Channel Awareness User documents as well as executable software tools that are needed to perform special learning steps (R2). has Template Mail Chat.... Figure 1: Conceptual design of CURE Figure 2 shows an example of how a room called Databases is displayed in a Web browser. This room is part of a virtual database lab, where students learn how to use CRC-cards. The display of a room consists of two parts: the content part (upper pane) and the communication part (lower pane). The round buttons in the top right corner of the upper pane provide means for creating and manipulating the room s content. The inner frame labeled with Student shows the page that is currently read in the room (i.e. the Student page containing the CRC-card for a class Student ). The lower pane supports awareness and communication by providing a user list and a chat. In general, a room provides a location where a group can meet to perform a certain learning task. A group may contain several users. To support group communication (R3), a room offers communication channels such as chat, a group-centered news group, threaded discussions, and e- mail among group members. When users move into a new room, they are automatically provided with the communication channels to the current users of the new room. In addition, all group awareness features are tied to the room, e.g. the individual users may see who else is with them in the same room, and what they are currently doing. This facilitates coordination. To support the learning tasks, a room contains one or several pages that present and structure the material needed for the shared learning activities (R1). Two types of pages are supported: Content pages contain structured text content that is presented in a human readable form within the web page of the room. Binary pages are provided to upload external files into the room and thus make them accessible for the group members. The file may contain learning material such as Word or other Figure 2: User s view of a room in CURE A simple editor is provided that allows editing content pages using a simple syntax, comparable to a WIKI [8]. In particular, the syntax supports links to other content or binary pages, other rooms, external URLs or mail addresses. Using links to binary pages, external learning material or tools may be referenced and thus used wherever it is needed. For form-based input, pages may also be tied to templates (R8). Teachers can tailor the structure of a room s documents by defining special templates. A template contains two XHTML documents that are used to layout a page s content in the edit mode and the view mode. Since templates are defined using XHTML, we assume that only expert users will create or modify templates. Whenever a user edits a page, CURE uses the edit XHTML document to generate a form that represents the page s structure. During the course, the student can then fill out the form and store the results in a content page (by submitting the form). CURE then switches to the view mode, where the content of the content page is rendered for reading (using the XHTML document supplied for the view mode). In this step, the text answers are automatically formatted according to WIKI editing rules. The Student page shown in Figure 2 was created based on a template for CRC-cards (cf. section 4.2). Using rooms and pages, the learning environment can be structured to facilitate collaborative learning (R4): Whenever the focus of the group should change or a group should be split up into sub groups, a new room is used to arrange the necessary material. Whenever the same group is continuing to work on new material or on a 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 4

new subtask, they add another page to the current room. Each learning episode (i.e. learning task to be solved asynchronously or synchronously in a session) takes place in the appropriate room. coop. brainstorming application coop. E-R modeller Operating Systems Course - Hall Intro Study Room Legend: How to learn Cooperative Exercises Intro Exer cise 1 How to learn Exercise 1 - Group 1.... Chat.... Task Step 1 Step 2 Submi ssion Room Tool Sched uling Exer cise 7 Chat News Mail Group Building Awareness Page Group communication and awareness services within a room Chat News News Mail Awareness Mail Awareness.... Library Exercise 1 - Group n submission gateway to correction Figure3: Example structure of a collaborative learning environment of an operating systems course In the following, we illustrate CURE s structuring facilities using an example of how rooms and pages have been used to model the operating systems course at the FernUniversität Hagen (cf. Figure 3). The so called Operating Systems Course-Hall is the entry to point to the overall course material. All students signed up to the course have access to this room. The room contains an Introduction page explaining scope, goals and prerequisites for this course. The page How to learn explains how the room is organized and to be used. The hall offers communication channels to the group, such as a chat, so group members can talk to each other. The course notes are provided in a separate room linked to the hall. The instructors decided that studying the course material should not be disturbed by people just coming by, having a look at the course. People seriously working with the material should have a calm study room, therefore a separate Study Room has been created, which also supports discussions among course note readers. For the same reasons, bibliography work is supported in another Library Room linked to the hall. In addition, the operating systems course offers cooperative exercises [5],[6]. People interested in doing group exercises meet in an extra room linked to the hall. Next to an Introduction and How to learn-page, the Cooperative Exercises room offers pages for group building and scheduling of group meetings. From the Cooperative Exercise room, access to the seven cooperative exercises within the course is possible via the Link contained seven exercise pages (see, e.g., Exercise 1 page in figure 3). Prior to starting a collaborative exercise, users open the Group Building page to become a member of a group (R5). For this purpose, this page may offer group building facilities ranging from a simple, tablebased enrollment into groups to fully automatic group assignment based on personal preferences (such as times of availability, or preferred partners). As a result of the group building activity, users are assigned to a learning group. In figure 3, a total of n groups have been established, with one specific group room assigned to each group (R5) and exercise (see, e.g., Exercise 1 Group 1 in figure 3). E.g., the group rooms for Exercise 1 are accessible via links from the Exercise 1 page and from the Cooperative Exercise room. Each group room is only accessible for the respective group members (R6). After groups have been established, the group members need to determine a date and time for the joint exercise. By using the Scheduling page in the Group Exercises room users can negotiate the next meeting, e.g. by following the link to a meeting scheduling service (R7) comparable to Meet-O-Matic [13]. Alternatively, they could use the group s newsgroup or mail service to arrange a date. At the appropriate time, all group members enter their group room (e.g., Exercise 1 Group 1 in figure 3) and start working on the joint exercise. In the group room, they find pages with the task description and the subsequent steps the teacher proscribed for their problem solving process (R 4) (i.e. pages Step 1 and Step 2), followed by the submission page for their final solution. In our example, the teacher wants them to do a cooperative brainstorming first, followed by a cooperative concept mapping of the relationships between the concepts identified. The pages support opening of the respective cooperative tools for all members of the group (R9). Finally, the Submission page facilitates the submission of solutions to the correction phase (R10). Collaborative learning can be organized within a room by informally describing the proscribed learning procedure on pages by using text, diagrams, and embedding links to appropriate services, pages or adjacent rooms (R4). This way, teachers and learners can receive information about possible learning episodes and services, and may follow or deviate from the proscribed pattern. A strict workflow-like enactment service for executing learning scripts is currently not provided. Access permissions are defined by associating keys for rooms with groups and users (R6). A key provides access to a room. Distribution of keys restricts room access. 4.2 Tailoring in CURE In CURE, two levels of tailoring are supported: tailoring at the content level, and tailoring at the structural and functional (room) level. 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 5

Tailoring at the content level refers to changes of the content and appearance of content pages. For this purpose, a simple WIKI like syntax is provided to students and teachers for editing the content of pages. In addition, teachers can use templates to define and adapt the structure and appearance of pages. Figure 2 shows an example of displaying a page based on a template for CRC-cards. Figure 4 shows the editing view of the CRCcard shown in figure 2. The student is provided with input fields that map to information in the rendered document. Figure 5: The edit mode of the CRC-Card template Figure 4: The edit mode of the CRC-Card page Note that although figure 2 displays the CRC-Card using HTML tables, the student does not have to write any HTML syntax while editing (cf. figure 4). The formatting of the page is controlled by the template defined by the course designer: Since the teacher wants to support the students in using the methodology of CRCcards, he creates an appropriate page template to implement pages that look like CRC-cards. Figure 5 shows the template for CRC-cards. It consists of three parts: a title, a display template, and an edit template. The display template shown in the upper part of figure 5 is an XHTML document that controls the rendering of CRC-cards for classes (cf. Figure 2). It includes markups for formatting the content (like table- or color-tags). Special tags can be used in the template to include stored texts (like <renderedtext name= class /> to show the text that was entered in the input field named class ) or collaboration information that is maintained by CURE (like <editinformation /> to show, who last edited the page). The edit template shown in the lower part of figure 5 is an XHTML document that controls the editing of CRCcards (cf. Figure 4). It contains input fields for class, collaborations, and responsibilities (cf. figure 5). The part that defines an input area for the class would, e.g., look like this (highlighted in figure 5): <plaintextarea name='class' rows='20' cols='70' wrap='virtual'> <unrenderedtext name= class /> </plaintextarea> Templates also define, which other templates can be created as next pages from the page (not visible in figure 5). In the example of the CRC-Cards, the teacher could, e.g., define that the text entered in the collaborations field can only link to new CRC-cards, but not to pages using other templates. Note that the teacher did not have to change the underlying document model or the implementation of the learning environment to create any kinds of new content. From an end-user s point of view, templates guide the user in creating a consistent structure within his documents. We assume that especially in a pedagogical context, this can provide guidance and ease the process of creating content. It also relieves the students from thinking about formatting of pages. Tailoring at the structure level refers to changing the rooms, their content including tools (via binary pages) and their connections within a collaborative learning environment. For this purpose, teachers and students can add rooms and change the pages contained in a room. In addition, teachers can use a learning environment as a master copy for a new learning environment. As an example, consider the teacher of our operating systems course (cf. section 4.1). For the next semester, the teacher decides to duplicate the last semester s learning environment using a cloning function. This function duplicates the entire room and content structure, while 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 6

omitting the group and user data (since we assume new students in the next semester). By editing the room contents, new course material can be added. Since the teacher wants to enrich the course by introducing crosslecture topic discussion groups, he decides to add a group building and scheduling page to the course notes room. In addition, he adds new group rooms for each discussion topic, fills in some initial content and instructions pages, and connects them to the course notes room. When students sign up, they can sign up for groups and use the group rooms to discuss the topic with peer learners using the group room s communication channels. In addition, a teacher could also include, e.g., an argumentation tool into the group discussion rooms via a binary page. In summary, tailoring at the content and structural and functional level enables teachers (R11) and students (R12) to adapt the collaborative learning environment to their needs, even at run-time (R13). 5. Implementation Our learning platform should be based on Internet standards (R14). We also want to provide software components that can be easily integrated with other software, in particular with FernUniversität Hagen s LVU-Platform 2003, the basis of our virtual university. Therefore, the whole development is based on standard Java technologies and Java-based open source frameworks. Figure 6 shows the software architecture of our prototype. Users access the CSCL Portal via a standard web browser. The functionality of the CSCL Portal is implemented in an pure Java-based object-oriented domain model. The runtime environment is provided by Jakarta s Tomcat servlet container, which connects the Web-Interface and the domain model. For persistence, the object-oriented domain model is saved on the file system using the Jdom XML framework. Starting at the CSCL Portal URL, user interactions result into sending HTTP requests that will be delivered from Tomcat, after analysing the HTTP request, to the responsible CSCL Portal front-end servlets. To communicate the result back to the user, the relevant aspects of object representations have to be visualized as HTML data. A special visualisation and rendering component developed by us generates the HTML document, which can then be handled by the servlets in the web server and are thus presented to the clients via HTTP by Tomcat. The integration of a mail server (James) into the server enables email-based communication with the server. Using parsing technology, the email messages can be processed by the server and reflected in the object model for future reference and message dispatching. This is, e.g., used to forward mails addressed to a room to the room s users private mail boxes. Client CSCW App. Mgmt Client Client Client Browser James HTTP SMTP Web-Server TomCat Servlets Parser Visualisation Java OO Domain Model Figure 6: System architecture of CURE User LVU User Templates Pages Rooms XML An interface to external CSCW applications supports configuration and maintenance of the structure of applications calls and parameters as well as the passing of parameters and correct process invocation. Later, we will integrate CURE with the LVU platform (e.g. LVU s user management, cf. figure 6) to benefit from the virtual university s organisational data and use of official access permissions. 6. Experiences In this section, we report about our experiences with two groups of teachers, who constructed two collaborative learning environments: an operating systems course in the school of computer science, and a virtual seminar in the school of psychology. As already presented in section 4, CURE has been successfully used to develop the collaborative distance learning environment for the operating systems course, including support for cooperative exercises (our first scenario, cf. section 2). Instead of providing a separate tool for collaborative exercises, CURE allows the integration of collaborative exercises into the context of the overall course. The teacher of the operating systems course used a specific combination of rooms and pages to support the intended type of group work. E.g., for different didactical approaches, such as individual learning, group discussions, joint bibliography work or collaborative exercises, appropriate rooms and pages have been created: Starting from the Operating Systems Course - Hall, different kinds of learning activities related to the course are offered in separate rooms. Each room accommodates the appropriate content and communication interests of the learners. Looking at the Cooperative Exercises Room, all material needed to start working on a cooperative exercise is offered in a single room. Here, all students interested in participating in cooperative exercises meet at a central place, where they are informed about all organizational and task related issues for participating in an actual collaborative exercise. Once a concrete sub groups wants to begin working on a collaborative 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 7

exercise, this sub group leaves the central room and follows the link to their group room. This room provides their group environment for the specific learning task. As shown in section 4.2, a single clone operation enables the reuse of previously developed learning environments. By introducing new rooms and form-based pages, it was easy for the teacher to tailor a copy of a running environment for its use in the next semester. Subgroup Room 1.1 Reception Group Room 1 Subgroup Room 1.2 Seminar Room.... Inter Group Room G1 + G9 Subgroup Room 9.1 Group Room 9 Subgroup Room 9.2 Figure 7: The structure of the virtual seminar environment In the school of psychology, a group of teachers constructed a collaborative learning environment for a seminar on psychological methods. The design of this type of seminar is as follows: 36 students plus their instructors work on psychological methods during one semester. The students are split up into nine groups of four. Every group is provided with the same material, but gets a different question to answer or topic to analyze. Important topics are often assigned to several subgroups. Teachers then request that students do not exchange material. Each topic is further structured into questions that need to be answered by sub groups of two. This feature has been introduced to allow more fine grained grading of the individual activities and to increase the engagement of participants. A crucial issue for the teachers of this seminar is the forming of the overall group of 36 students. Depending on the topic of the overall seminar, there may be many more than 36 students interested in participating. Thus, the students have to undergo a selection process. In order to apply for the seminar, they have to fill in an application form. Based on the submitted applications the teachers select the students according to officially published rules. To support the above type of seminar, the teachers used CURE to create the room structure shown in figure 7. All students enrolled in the psychology school can enter the Reception room. Here, students find the application form to be filled in. The result of the selection process is published in this room, and also sent by e-mail to students who entered their application in the form. The Seminar Room is the central meeting place for the seminar. From here, nine group rooms with their adjacent rooms for the subgroups of two can be reached. All group rooms are only accessible to group members only the seminar room supports communication between groups. Thus, no direct collaboration between groups is supported, which was a requirement by the teachers. The creation of this structure was rather simple: The teacher created an initial group for four people: a room with four extra keys for potential group members. He added the two adjacent rooms with only two keys for two potential group members. Since the teacher was the creator of the room, he also possessed a key for all these rooms. Then, the teacher put seminar material and needed tools into the group room, and added a page for the question to be answered by the subgroup. The remaining eight rooms were created by cloning the first group room and by changing the group tasks where necessary. After the set up of this room structure, students can visit the Reception and apply for the seminar. The responsible instructor assigns the selected students a key for the Seminar Room. After this selection process, the teacher sends an invitation email for the initial seminar kick-off meeting to the Seminar Room. Using the embedded email facilities, the room not only stores the email in the rooms newsgroup, but also automatically forwards this email to the individual email-addresses of all CURE users possessing a key for this rooms, i.e. to all group members of the seminar. In the Seminar room, the group building for the nine groups of four takes place. In addition, the teachers require every participant (teacher and student) to provide a so-called mini-homepage, describing the participants and their interests. For this purpose, a standard homepage form provided by CURE (as a prototypical example for the usage of CURE) has been tailored by the teachers: e.g., a mandatory field for entering the name of the participant s favorite psychologist was added. The Seminar Room is also the plenary for presenting results. To present results, students copy their results into dedicated pages of the Seminar Room. Here, all group members can examine the results. During a certain period, all participants read all results and post their questions/comments to the room s newsgroup. At certain dates, synchronous chat sessions take place. The teachers also decided to support discussions between groups working on the same or related topics, if need arises. E.g., it may be necessary to have an advance presentation and discussion of the results with the teacher and the members of the respective groups. Teachers addressed this problem with CURE s run-time tailoring functionality: when the need for inter-group meetings arises, teachers will create additional meeting rooms (e.g., see Inter Group Room G1+G9 in figure 8) at run time. Overall, our experiences so far indicate that CURE meets the demands of at least two of our scenarios. Teachers were able to construct collaborative learning environments supporting their didactical needs. We also performed design review sessions with teachers for the other three scenarios that confirmed that teachers think 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 8

they can use CURE for constructing collaborative learning environments meeting their demands. During the next two months, they will use CURE to test its applicability. Due to space limitations, we cannot provide more details here. 7. Comparison to Related Work Related work can be categorized into three groups: general CSCW environments, collaborative learning environments, and learning platforms. BSCW [1] is an example of a shared workspace system. It has also been used in many educational settings. BSCW provides workspaces, which can (to some extent) be mapped to CURE s rooms. The workspaces provide means for communication and sharing documents. Anyhow, there are no easy means for structuring the content of managed shared documents, as it is provided with CURE s page templates. With respect to the editing functionality, CURE is comparable to many other CSCW environments that provide editable web pages. The most prominent are WIKIs [8] and SparrowWeb [2]. A Swiki [4] (as one representative of the class of WIKIs) also provides means to define a page s appearance in both edit and view mode. But the system lacks in means for defining more structured content. It only provides a small pre-defined set of text fields. SparrowWeb provides means for creating editable web pages based on a table metaphor. Users can define the structure of the content (the columns of the table) and describe, how the content is rendered on the page. With this respect, our system is very similar to SparrowWeb. Anyhow, SparrowWebs don t provide easy editing means (like the WIKI syntax). By allowing users to place links to other rooms in a room, CURE provides an easy means for supporting the navigation and transition between different collaborative learning spaces. The room in sum provides access to all shared resources and communication facilities such as e- mail, chat and other communication channels, which is often not supported in traditional WIKIs. These issues are crucial for facilitating collaborative learning. In the research community, several collaborative learning environments have been developed. CROCODILE [10] and VITAL [12] are also using a room or virtual world metaphor. Learners can navigate between rooms and access shared material. However, both systems require prior setup of rooms and material tailoring at run-time is not supported, nor the reuse of learning environments through cloning. Other PBL support systems such as CNB [4], CSILE [13], Belvedere [14], and Web-SMILE [4] are mostly implemented on the web and support mainly asynchronous construction of shared knowledge. However, run-time tailoring and flexible structuring of learning environments for different, subsequent learning phases are usually not supported. Furthermore, communication and collaboration tools are limited to the integrated tools. KOLUMBUS [7] is an asynchronous collaborative learning platform, which integrates the presentation of multimedia material partitioned into small items with communication contributions about the material. Students can add material and annotate the contributions of others. Collaboration is supported via (1) forming discussion through linking annotations, and (2) by voting. While KOLUMBUS requires the teacher to predefine the structure of the learning environment, which is later filled by students, CURE enables teachers and students to change the structure of rooms and pages on demand. While KOLUMBUS targets asynchronous communication, CURE supports also synchronous collaboration through embedded collaborative tools and via the communication channels attached to rooms. Lotus Learning Space is a commercially available CSCL platform. Learning Space [9] focuses on supporting entire courses and section through shared multimedia course material, scheduling and assignment support, and its communication center. While pre-organized teachercentered classes work well, end user tailoring and dynamic group formation is not supported. An interesting research result is the L-3 learning platform [17]: L-3 supports embedding collaborative activities into the web-based course material. After these activities have been specified as points-of-cooperation by the teacher (e.g., a brainstorming, or a role-play) the platform supports group formation at runtime. However, there is no support for run-time tailoring. Compared to all solutions mentioned above, CURE provides means for group formation, group maintenance and group awareness. Using the room metaphor provides the learners with a learning space that is very comparable to a real university building (and thus hopefully intuitive to most users). The room metaphor has proven to be successful in many CSCW and CSCL settings [3], [9], but we are not aware of any approaches that combine room metaphors with WIKI technology. The room-metaphor combined with the extended template concept provides an organizational mechanism for content management and tailoring. This combination is the key to support two levels of tailoring. Allowing teachers to clone any part of the content or any room facilitates reuse. WIKIs often allow cloning of content, but lack in an appropriate means for replicating structure that exceeds a single WIKI. 8. Conclusions In this paper, we introduced the CURE collaborative learning platform as a response to the needs of five collaborative distance learning scenarios at our university. CURE offers interconnected rooms containing learning 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 9

material and tools for communication, coordination and collaborative learning. It provides the basic functionality for structuring learning environments via rooms, pages and groups, and supports group formation, communication, coordination and collaboration within the shared learning environment. Users can adapt the learning environment by tailoring at the content and structural level. Our approach exceeds related work with respect to its support for synchronous and asynchronous learning, and its facilities for run-time tailoring. Combining rooms and templates facilitates tailoring by teachers and students. A first working prototype was successfully used with teachers to create first versions of collaborative learning environments to be used in pilot courses in fall 2003. The implementation of a generic interface to collaborative applications will be completed until summer 2003. Bases on the experiences from the pilots in this winter semester, we will define good practice examples, and inform the design of an improved version. Eventually, the improved version will become a part of our virtual university. References [1] Bentley, R., Horstmann, T., Sikkel, K., and Trevor J. Supporting Collaborative Information Sharing with the World Wide Web: The BSCW Shared Workspace System. In Proceedings of the 4th International WWW Conference, Issue 1, O'Reilly, Dec. 1995, pp. 63-74. [2] Bier, E. A. and Pier, K.: Sparrow Web: Group-Writable Information on Structured Web Pages. In: Proceedings of CHI2003, ACM Press: Fort Lauderdale, 2003, 634-635. [3] Greenberg, S. and Roseman, M.: Using a Room Metaphor to Ease Transitions in Groupware. In Ackermann, M., Pipek, V. and Wulf, V. (Ed.): Beyond Knowledge Management: Sharing Expertise, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA,2003. [4] Guzdial, M., Rick, J. and Kerimbaew, B.: Recognizing and Supporting Roles in CSCW. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2000 Conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW2000), ACM-Press: New York, 2000, 261-268. [5] Haake, J., Schümmer, T., and Haake, A. Supporting Collaborative Exercises for Distance Education. Proc. of HICSS 36 (HICSS 2003), Hawaii, January 5-9, 2003. IEEE Press. [6] Haake, J. M. and Schuemmer, T. Some Experiences with Collaborative Exercises. To appear in: Proceedings of CSCL 03, (Bergen, Norway, June 14-18), Kluwer Academic Publishers. [7] Kienle, A., Hermann, T. Integration of Communication, Coordination and Learning Material - A Guide for the Functionality of Collaborative Learning Environments. Proc. of HICSS 36 (HICSS 2003), Hawaii, January 5-9, 2003. IEEE Press. [8] Leuf, B. and Cunningham, W.: The Wiki Way. Addison Wessley, Longman, 2001. [9] http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/learnspace [10] Miao, Y., Haake, J. M. (2001). Supporting Problem Based Learning by a Collaborative Virtual Environment: A Cooperative Hypermedia Approach. Proceedings of the 34 th Hawaii International Conference on System Science. HICSS 2002, Hawai, January 2001. [11] O'Neill, D. K. The Collaboratory Notebook: A Networked Knowledge-Building Environment for Project Learning, In: T. Ottmann & I. Tomek (Eds.), Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, pp. 416-423, VA: AACE, 1994. [12] Pfister, H., Schuckmann, C., Beck-Wilson, J. and Wessner, M.: The Metaphor of Virtual Rooms in the Cooperative Learning Environment CLear. In Streitz, N., Konomi, S. and Burkhardt, H. (Ed.): Cooperative Buildings - Proceedings of CoBuild'98, LNCS1370, Springer: Heidelberg, 1998, 107-113. [13] Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C., and Lamon, M. The CSILE project: Trying to bring the classroom into World 3, In: K. McGilly (ed.), Classroom lessons - Integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice, pp. 201-228. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. [14] Suthers, D.D. Toth, E., and Weiner, A. An Integrated Approach to Implementing Collaborative Inquiry in the Classroom, In: the Proceedings of CSCL'97, pp. 272-279, Toronto, December 10-14, 1997. [15] Watt, S. and Eisenstadt, M. meet-o-matic. http://www.meetomatic.com, accessed May 2003. [16] Wessner, M. and Pfister, H. Group formation in computersupported collaborative learning, Proceedings of the 2001 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP'01), ACM Press: Boulder, CO, USA, 2001, 24-31. [17] Wessner, M., Haake, J. M., Tietze, D. (2002). An infrastructure for Collaborative Lifelong Learning. Proceedings of the 35 th Hawaii International Conference on System Science. HICSS 2002, Hawai, January 2002. [18] Woods, D. Problem Based Learning: How to Get the Most from PBL, McMaster University. 1994. 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 10