Chatbot and Conversational Analysis to Promote Collaborative Learning in Distance Education

Collaboration is a factor that influences students' learning, allowing them to adopt more active posture in knowledge construction. Learning Management Systems have been used to promote collaboration at a distance. However, characterizing and identifying relevant aspects of Learning Management System collaboration in order to continuously encourage learning remains a challenging problem. This paper addresses this relevant issue and proposes a Conversational Agent, also known as Chatbot, that adopts the Conversational Analysis, currently used to identify the appropriation of social networks, to recognize Distance Education context. The goal of this recognizing is for making proper interventions in the design and monitoring of online collaborative activities, and for encourage discussion among students from the use of Academically Productive Talk structure. In order to promote effective collaboration among students, and support teachers to act on it, the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning precepts are also considered to propose and implement this educational technology.