Supporting social awareness in collaborative e‐learning

Abstract

In the last decade, we have seen the emergence of virtual learning environments. Initially, these environments were a little more than document repositories that tutor used unicast to the students. Informed in part by social constructivist theories of education, later environments included capabilities for tutor-student and student-student, synchronous and asynchronous communication. The initial research of this paper reports the typical low usage of these capabilities. The main research attempted to ameliorate this problem by the provision of tools to promote a sense of social awareness as self-presence and copresence, and evaluation techniques to analyse e-learners' interactions. Data was obtained from prepost questionnaires, log files and social network analysis which augmented the data provided by the tools embedded in Moodle. The results indicate the importance of social awareness in effective e-learning; the quality of active participation can be increased by the use of associated tools. The e-tutor's role is still pivotal to facilitate and to support such engagement towards collaborative learning. Implications for future research suggest that social awareness tools and evaluation techniques can create awareness cues in an interface with a potential impact on learning. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic:• Learning Management Systems integrated applications do not fully support sociocultural and collaborative learning as such • Theoretical and analytical frameworks in social awareness in the purpose of collaborative e-learning do not exist • Such applications in wide use Learning Management Systems are not specifically designed to support social awareness What this paper adds:• Better understanding of the e-learning social aspects • A new analytical framework for social awareness as self-and co-presence as well as evaluation techniques and their increasing importance attached to collaborative e-learning activities • An innovative human-computer interaction in education approach to design requirements for tools in order to match specific pedagogical targets, in this case social awareness Implications for practice and/or policy:• Social awareness as self-and co-presence has a positive effect in collaborative e-learning • There needs to be direct fit between the everyday educational practice and the analytical frameworks proposed towards requirements for associated applications and systems • The e-tutor's role is still pivotal as a director and orchestrator of collaborative e-learning activities, however she needs specific tools and techniques to support her for effective group knowledge building • As we head towards a complete networked 21st century society, the positive effect of social awareness tools and evaluation techniques, addresses the need for coherent context-aware interfaces for an impact on positive e-learning experience IntroductionThe importance of social awareness in e-learning has only recently been investigated despite its significance to contemporary socio-cultural learn...

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IRRODL Volume 12, Number 5

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