Three Common Group Formations in Online Collaborative Learning

摘要

With the widespread use of emerging computer technologies in teaching and learning, computer-supported collaboration as a beneficial teaching and learning strategy is now embraced in campus. Analyzing the influencing factors of individual participation is important to discover a more efficient group forming in terms of accomplishing collaborative learning tasks. Through the social network analysis approach on the collected data, this research has found that personality trait does affect a student's activeness and the group's mode. Three main group modes are discovered: Unipolar, Multi-Center, and Centerless-Flat mode. Multi-Center group mode is more stable and has higher average academic achievement than the other two modes. The research findings can be used to implement an intelligent tutoring system that can make recommendations for teachers on the better options of grouping students based on their personality traits.