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When the goal of group activities is to support long-term learning, the task of designing well-thought-out collaborative learning (CL) scenarios is an important key to success. To help students adequately acquire and develop their knowledge and skills, a teacher can plan a scenario that increases the probability for learning to occur. Such a scenario defines pedagogically sound structures that prevent off-task behavior and engage students in more meaningful interactions. The main difficulty in designing effective CL scenarios is transforming the teacher's intentions into elements that constitute the learning scenario. This problem is frequently observed when novice teachers attempt to improve the quality of learning and instruction by blending collaborative activities with individual activities without careful planning. With the goal of helping teachers in planning collaborative scenarios, we have developed an intelligent authoring tool referred to as CHOCOLATO using Semantic Web technologies (e.g. ontologies) in order to represent knowledge about different pedagogies and practices related to collaboration. Through the use of this knowledge, CHOCOLATO can provide intelligent guidance that helps teachers to create theory-based CL scenarios which has proven to be effective in a variety of situations. We evaluated it by conducting two experiments. We were interested in verifying whether the recommendations given by CHOCOLATO help novice teachers to design pedagogically sound CL activities, and if these activities help students to learn collaboratively in real classroom settings. The first experiment had the participation of 58 pre-service teachers that created CL scenarios with and without our authoring tool and the second experiment was carried out in a Brazilian public school together with 218 students. The results suggest that the guidance provided by CHOCOLATO do help novice teachers plan, understand and share CL scenarios more easily. They also suggest that the continuous utilization of well-designed theory-based CL activities create favorable conditions for students (particularly less knowledgeable ones) to improve their overall performance throughout the school year. (Contains 11 figures.)

One of the most useful ways to enhance collaboration is to create scenarios where learners are able to interact more effectively. Nevertheless, the design of pedagogically sound and well-thought-out collaborative learning scenarios is a complex issue. This is due to the context of group learning where the synergy among learners' interactions affects learning processes and, hence, the learning outcome. Although many advances have been made to support the designing of collaborative learning scenarios through technology, a more systematic approach is lacking. With the limitations of the current designing methods and tools, it is difficult to develop intelligent authoring systems that can guide users in order to produce more effective collaboration. One of the main difficulties with creating a more consistent (computer-understandable) approach to designing collaboration is the necessity of proposing better ways to formalize the group learning processes. In this paper, we present an innovative approach that uses ontologies and concepts from learning theories to create a framework that represents collaborative learning and its processes. Ontologies provide the necessary formalization to represent collaboration, while learning theories provide the concepts to justify and support the development of effective learning scenarios. Such an approach contributes to establish the foundations for the development of the next generation of intelligent authoring systems referred to as theory-aware systems. To verify the viability and usefulness of our proposed ontological framework in the context of systematic design, the development and use of an intelligent authoring tool for CSCL design is presented. This system is able to reason on ontologies to give suggestions that help users to create theory-compliant collaborative learning scenarios. We carried out several experiments with teachers in a geometry drawing course and the results indicate that the system helps teachers to create and interchange their scenarios more easily and facilitates the selection of important pedagogical strategies that influence positively the designing and effectiveness of group activities. (Contains 3 tables and 20 figures.)

One of the key issues in e-learning environments is the possibility of creating and evaluating exercises. However, the lack of tools supporting the authoring and automatic checking of exercises for specifics topics (e.g., geometry) drastically reduces advantages in the use of e-learning environments on a larger scale, as usually happens in Brazil. This paper describes an algorithm, and a tool based on it, designed for the authoring and automatic checking of geometry exercises. The algorithm dynamically compares the distances between the geometric objects of the student's solution and the template's solution, provided by the author of the exercise. Each solution is a geometric construction which is considered a function receiving geometric objects (input) and returning other geometric objects (output). Thus, for a given problem, if we know one function (construction) that solves the problem, we can compare it to any other function to check whether they are equivalent or not. Two functions are equivalent if, and only if, they have the same output when the same input is applied. If the student's solution is equivalent to the template's solution, then we consider the student's solution as a correct solution. Our software utility provides both authoring and checking tools to work directly on the Internet, together with learning management systems. These tools are implemented using the dynamic geometry software, iGeom, which has been used in a geometry course since 2004 and has a successful track record in the classroom. Empowered with these new features, iGeom simplifies teachers' tasks, solves non-trivial problems in student solutions and helps to increase student motivation by providing feedback in real time. (Contains 10 figures and 6 tables.)