Supporting Distance Learners For Collaborative Problem Solving

This paper describes a computer -supported environment to facilitate distance learning through collaborative problem-solving. Our goal is to encourage distance learning students to work together, in order to promote both learning of collaboration and learning through collaboration. Collaboration means working together on a common problem, communicating and coordinating activities towards a shared goal. We propose a system embedding three models: an activity model, a domain model and a conversational model. The system can support asynchronous collaboration in a number of dimensions: giving structure to activities and communication to articulate the problem solving-task, supplying a share space to build jointly common knowledge, providing relevant know-how by case and techniques libraries and facilitating further reflection on the whole learning process. Preliminary results have convinced us that this approach offers promises to establish collaborative distance frameworks to enhance students learning processes.