Paving the Road Towards Supporting Scalable Collaborative Writing in High-Diversity Distance Learning Groups

Abstract

Nowadays, collaborative learning in a virtual environment is highly relevant, especially in distance education and during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, higher education institutions are striving to develop software tools for collaborative online learning and to support large numbers of students working simultaneously. For this purpose, it is important to collect information about the ongoing process of the collaborative work, especially learning and interaction data, e.g. how the students interact with the other group members and whether or how they exchange information with the teachers. These collected data are then analysed with methods of learning analytics with the help of the software tools and the results are used to support learners and teachers. In this paper, an architecture is proposed that enables collaborative writing by hundreds of students divided into many groups. It uses the synergy of the learning environment Moodle and the online editor Etherpad Lite. The needed software tools can be easily integrated into it. A prototype of the architecture and first required methods of data collection and learning analytics have already been developed and successfully tested in a first pilot usage with about 300 students. The long-term goal of this project is to support collaborative writing in near real time using self-developed software.