An Online Tool to Manage and Assess Collaborative Group Work

Abstract

For a long time collaborative work has been seen as an important pedagogical methodology. Lately there has been an increased interest in creating tools that allow and foster collaborative work in online and web-based environments. However, despite these efforts most of the available tools today only allow students to participate in a collaborative work. Issues like helping the teacher to create the whole collaborative activity and, helping the students to collaborate with each other are usually left out from the automatic tools. Interestingly, one of the main difficulties that hamper collaboration between students during a course work is that they do not know how to do delegate tasks, how to set deadlines and how to control the colleagues' contribution's in a democratic way. This later issue is particularly important because most collaborative systems do not offer a mechanism to differentiate the group participants in order to assess and grade them individually. In this article we propose and describe a system capable of creating group tasks while providing information that would help to individually assess each group member. The system can be configured in order to leverage the collaboration between students and guiding them in this sort of working methodology. The proposed system features two operating modes: the sequential and the simultaneous activity. It also includes the possibility to establish time limits for each assigned task; an automatic forum for mandatory comments upon referred drawbacks on a colleague's work; a versioning system associated with the simultaneous activity, and the retrieval of all logged interactions, provided in the form of a report which we believe ultimately would help the teacher to differentiate group participants in order to assess their work and grade them individually.