Group Discussions

Introduction

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This courseware demonstrates using eLMS profiles to support multi-participant discussions—as a straightforward example of collaborative work—that can be embedded within courseware authored with CAPE. The design provides a basic infrastructure for discussion forums where participants can asynchronously review articles and contribute new articles. The interface provided by this infrastructure supports manually or automatically polling for new articles. A simple interface is provided for authoring new articles. The forum participants can remain anonymous. The articles in a forum can be sorted by time (default), subject, or author (if the articles are attributed). The demonstration uses this infrastructure to support a class-wide online discussion. Also provided in the design package are a couple of different demonstrations of mini-group discussions.

Demonstration

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Below is a Captivate (Flash) movie of two students participating in a class-wide online discussion. These courseware deliveries are started using the QuotaLinks approach. When users access the QuotaLink, a Launcher courseware (also authored with CAPE) collects their identity information and creates or continues a courseware delivery.

Start the demonstration by pressing the Play button on the playback control at the center top of the movie. You may need to scroll the browser window down to see the entire movie.

As the demonstration proceeds, the student on the left (Jane Doe) initiates and authors a new article for the discussion. The student on the right (John Doe) uses the Check for articles control to check for a new article and retrieves the article just authored by Jane Doe. Alternatively, John Doe could have selected the Auto checkbox and automatically retrieved the new article when available. This setting performs the same action as manually polling but on a timed basis (every 30 seconds.)

Try It Yourself

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If you want to try the courseware out for yourself, just click the QuotaLink. You can create a new student identity for yourself by entering your information into the Launcher and choosing a passcode.

Design

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The CAPE courseware design for the demonstration module appears in the figure below. On the left is the module design showing the embedded discussion element (Discussion Group). For the purposes of the demonstration, this element is simply scaffolded by granules providing an introduction (Introduction) and a conclusion (Finish). On the right is the design of the discussion element. Adaptive sequencing is used to control the initialization of a region of the Class Profile that will support the discussion. Adaptive content is used to support the interactions with a single granule (Discuss). eLMS Platform Services (Learner and Courseware) support identifying the student and the courseware, respectively. Entries in the Class profile (Class_Profile) are keyed by the courseware name.

The design uses eLMS Web Services to support the interactions. This means that the entire discussion occurs while the courseware delivery is positioned at the Discuss granule. The GroupServices condition set provides a facade for services in the Group condition set, limiting access by role using access control features of condition sets. Among the services provided by Group are adaptive content generators that feed HTML down to the browser interface for the discussion forum. This basic approach is in the style of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML).

The courseware design is available in the CAPE Repository in the author area of Larry Howard in a folder named Discussions. Also contained in this mini-project folder are adaptations of the basic discussion group infrastructure to support mini-group discussions, where a class is split into groups and discussions occur among these sets of participants.

Discussion

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The importance of this demonstration lies not in the particular capabilities or their features. These could be easily enhanced and extended, both functionally and aesthetically. Rather, the importance is in the use of shared state provided by eLMS Profiles to enable collaborative features in courseware that typically focuses on individualized instruction. Discussion groups are just a simple example of what is possible using this enabling mechanism.

Such collaborative elements can be situated within larger instructional designs, allowing them to be scaffolded and to be used in concert with other pedagogical elements. When and how they are used are subject to all of the adaptation mechanisms supported by CAPE.

Feedback

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We welcome your feedback on any aspect of the design or delivery of this courseware. Please send your remarks to the author. Learn more about CAPE and eLMS at the Adaptive Learning Technologies web site.