Adapting the Collaborative Strategy 'Students Team Achievement Divisions' in an Information Technology Work Place

摘要

This paper presents an innovative description and an initial implementation of the "Students Team Achievement Divisions (STAD)" collaboration method (Slavin, 1978), in the form of an online adaptive collaborative design-pattern that has been constructed taking into account adaptation techniques, within the context of an open-source learning design-based environments such as the LAMS system (Dalziel, 2003). This method is described with special reference to the learning of essential aspects of an Information System. The innovative description of the aforementioned collaborative method within the LAMS system is based on the fact that: (a) the tasks assigned to the groups consist of investigation of real world scenarios, and not merely the study of learning material as is usually proposed, (b) adaptive techniques are integrated with the method and (c) for the design of the collaborative learning activity, an intuitive learning design tool such as the LAMS system is used. A research study was also conducted aiming the development of an empirical model to allow the implementation of the aforementioned adaptive STAD collaborative method within the context of an IT work place, namely; the Legal Council of the Hellenic State. In fact, the data gathered from this study were used to build the initial learning profile of the user -that is needed for the implementation of Phase 2 of the previously mentioned adaptive STAD collaborative method- so that to be able to provide him/her personalized training, monitoring, scaffolding and evaluation.