The aim of this research is to explore solutions for improving the delivery of support for group work in collaborative learning environments, which can provide an enhanced and efficient way for teachers to cope with tasks of constructing collaborative groups and diagnosing group collaboration problems.
To achieve this aim, the following objectives are to be addressed.
• Identify major student-induced group collaboration problems and their causes from the perspectives of students via a nationwide survey, and provide a machine-readable form of the linkages between the problems and their causes.
• Propose an approach that can automatically diagnose the identified types of group collaboration problems based on student interactions with a collaborative learning environment.
• Carry out an evaluation of the diagnostic mechanism developed using a mixture of methods to determine its validity and effectiveness in ascertaining the existence of the collaboration problems identified on a test dataset.
The contributions of this thesis are presented as follows.
• Based on the results from a survey-based study, this research identifies major student-induced group collaboration problems and their causes from the perspectives of students, and establishes a machine-readable representation of the linkages between the major problems and their causes. This is the first study that systematically addresses this issue, and the representation provides a unique perspective on the linkages between the problems and causes identified.
1.3 Definition of some key words
Artificial Intelligence: is the branch of computer science concerned with making computers behave like humans. The term was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Artificial intelligence includes the following areas of specialization:
• Games Playing: Programming computers to play games against human opponents
• Expert system: Programming computers to make decisions in real-life situations (for example, some expert systems help doctors diagnose diseases based on symptoms)
• Natural language: Programming computers to understand natural human languages
• Neural network: Systems that stimulate intelligence by attempting to reproduce the types of physical connections that occur in animal brains
• Robotics: programming computers to see and hear and react to other sensory stimuli
The delivery of intelligent support for group work is a complex issue in collaborative learning environments. This particularly pertains to the construction of effective groups and assessment of collaboration problems.
Collaborative learning: is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together, unlike individual learning, people engaged in collaborative learning capitalize on one another’s resources and skills(asking one another for information, evaluating one another’s ideas, monitoring one another’s work, etc.) and also collaborative learning refers to methodologies and environments in which learners engage in a common task where each individuals depends on and is accountable to each other. These include both face-to-face conversations and computer discussions (online forums, chat rooms etc.). Methods for examining collaborative learning processes include conversation analysis and statistical discourse analysis.
Extensible Markup Language: XML code, a formal recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is similar to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Both XML and HTML contain markup symbols to describe page or file contents. HTML code describes Web page content (mainly text and graphic images) only in terms of how it is to be displayed and interacted with. XML data is known as self-describing or self-defining, meaning that the structure of the data is embedded with the data, thus when the data arrives there is no need to pre-build the structure to store the data; it is dynamically understood within the XML. The XML format can be used by any individual or group of individuals or companies that want to share information in a consistent way. XML is actually a simpler and easier-to-use subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which is the standard to create a document structure.
1.4 Concept of Artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of Science which deals with helping machines finding solutions to complex problems in a more human-like fashion. This generally involves borrowing characteristics from human intelligence, and applying them as algorithms in a computer friendly way.
AI currently encompasses a huge variety of subfields, from general-purpose areas such as perception and logical reasoning, to specific tasks such as playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, writing poetry, and diagnosing diseases. Often, scientists in other fields move gradually into artificial intelligence, where they find the tools and vocabulary to systematize and automate the intellectual tasks on which they have been working all their lives. Similarly, workers in AI can choose to apply their methods to any area of human intellectual endeavor. In this sense, it is truly a universal field.
AI is the computer-based exploration of methods for solving challenging tasks that have traditionally depended on people for solution. Such tasks include complex logical inference, diagnosis, and visual recognition, comprehension of natural language, game playing, explanation, and planning.
AI is the study of how to make computers do things which at the moment people do better. This is ephemeral as it refers to the current state of computer science and it excludes a major area; problems that cannot be solved well either by computers or by people at the moment.