E-grupo: um ambiente para suporte à aprendizagem colaborativa baseada na web.

Abstract

This work has as objective to project and to implement a tool that facilitates the students of Distance Courses Based on the World Wide Web to communicate with each other and with one or more facilitators for the accomplishment of group works. Pedagogically, this type of activity is very important in conventional courses. Further, it aims to make possible the use of the resources available in the Web to provide these students with new ways to interact, coordinate their work, allocate tasks among themselves, and to perform other activities that they cannot perform in conventional courses. Although there are good systems available that can support group work, none of them are aimed to support Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). This tools are aimed to support Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) at large and do not take into account specific requirements of collaborative learning. Among these requirements we can mentioned those linked to the pedagogic aspects related with the process of knowledge construction in distributed environments supported by computers and psycho-social aspects linked to role of the teacher in a conventional course. Another important aspect is the nature of the interaction between the users of the systems; here accomplishing success in the development of a given task is strongly related with the acquisition of knowledge by all users involved and not solely with the generation of a product to be delivered. The Web based CSCL environment developed in this work aims to satisfy the aforementioned requirements.