Grouping in collaborative e-learning environment based on interaction among students

Abstract

Collaborative learning is an online classroom can take the form of conversation between the whole classes or within smaller groups. Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is a free and open source e-learning software platform, also known as a Learning Management System, or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). As a web-based tool, Moodle offers the possible way to deliver courses which include an enormous variety of information sources - links to multimedia, websites and image - which are hard to deliver in a traditional teaching atmosphere. The converse (chat) activity module in moodle allows participants to encompass a realtime synchronous discussion in a moodle course. A teacher can organize users into groups within the course or within particular activities. This paper aims in efficient group formation of learners in a collaborative learning environment so that every individual in the group is benefitted. As a testing platform tenth standard Tamil text book is incorporated in to moodle. In this paper K-NN clustering algorithm is used to improve the group performance. This algorithm achieves good performance in terms of balancing the knowledge level among all the students.