Towards Software Infrastructure for the Systematic Virtualization of Collaborative Learning Sessions

This paper proposes the provision of software infrastructure to support new types of pedagogically augmented collaborative learning resources by means of an innovative software platform called Virtualized Collaborative Sessions (VCS). The VCS approach helps meet challenging pedagogical requirements in online collaborative learning, such as increasing student's engagement and learning performance during the collaboration. In turn, the systematic application of the VCS platform enriched with semantic technologies enables e-learning developers to embed successful collaborative learning experiences from external learning tools in a software reuse fashion. The platform is prototyped and successfully tested in real environments, thus showing the software reuse capability and the pedagogical benefits of the VCS approach.