Dynamic operationalisation of cooperative learning structures

Abstract

Cooperative learning is one of the most solid pieces of research in the educational field, as it is supported by multidisciplinary theories, it has been validated by empirical studies in classroom settings, and many researchers have devised concrete procedures to carry out co- operative learning activities in everyday practice. Among those pro- cedures, cooperative structures, the method coined by Kagan, stands out as one of the most successful lines of research. Cooperative struc- tures have proved to be useful to improve teaching-learning processes in a wide variety of subjects and target audiences. Nowadays, there is a great interest in the research of the use of Information Technology to support teaching-learning processes. Re- grettably, current languages and systems present serious deficiencies to support cooperative structures, which seriously compromise their applicability in real world computer mediated learning environments. This dissertation presents a quite exhaustive analysis of the state-of- the-art of the most advanced and featured languages and systems, which have been used by some researchers to try to support coopera- tive structures, making a special analysis of IMS-LD, as it represents the most important proposal to date. The objective of this dissertation is to analyse the requirements for the support of cooperative structures in technology-mediated envi- ronments and to design a framework capable of modelling and en- acting cooperative structures. The method that I devised to support cooperative structures is called dynamic operationalisation, and it has four cornerstones, namely: adaptive structures, lazy instantiation of structures, support for run-time decisions, and dynamic adaptation. The dynamic operationalisation method is the blueprint for the de- sign of CSML (Cooperative Structures Modelling Language), which is a Domain-Specific Language targeted at modelling cooperative struc- tures. This dissertation also describes the execution semantics for CSML. In order to evaluate CSML, I built a prototype (using Java EE) that implements its semantic model. The prototype is able to deploy a co- operative structure written in CSML and enact it. Then, I devised a series of scenarios, which take real cooperative structures taken from the literature as their starting point, and launched simulations to eval- uate how well the system supports the modelling and enactment of cooperative structures.