Monitoring and Assessment in Online Collaborative Environments: Emergent Computational Technologies for E-learning Support

Deadline for proposals: 30th April 2008

Groupware systems support co-operation among people at different times and geographical locations by providing: online shared spaces, online calendars and agendas, videoconference and instant messages services, web content multi-edition facilities, etc. In the beginning of the Web 2.0 era, such systems are gaining popularity and relevance among organizations such as global enterprises, open and distance universities and research institutes.

Yet, as an emergent area, there are several unsolved problems associated with these systems. In particular, there are no standard models to monitor and perform efficient assessment of individuals' and groups' activity in online collaborative working and learning environments. This issue is especially important in the collaborative e-working or e-learning contexts, since it can provide valuable information to online managers or instructors who may guide and support the development of efficient collaborative projects.

Monitoring activity allows establishing just-in-time assistance for those individuals or groups who need it. This way, both managers and instructors can anticipate potential problems -such as individuals' dropouts or possible conflicts inside the working groups- and take operational and tactical decisions to handle them. Furthermore, managers and instructors can use complementary quantitative and qualitative monitoring reports to develop performance assessment models in groupware systems.

Other unsolved problems are related to the efficient management of computer resources -memory, disc space and processing resources- in the distributed systems over which groupware systems are implemented. These two problems constitute the central focus of this book.

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