On enhancing on-line collaboration using fuzzy logic modeling

Web-based collaboration calls for professional skills and competences to the benefit of the quality of the collaboration and its output. Within this framework, educational virtual environments may provide a means for training upon these skills and in particular the collaborative ones. On the basis of the existing technological means such training may be enhanced even more. Designing considerations towards this direction include the close follow-up of the collaborative activity and provision of support grounded upon a pedagogical background. To this vein, a fuzzy logic-based expert system, namely Collaboration/Reflection-Fuzzy Inference System (C/R-FIS,) is presented in this paper. By means of interconnected FISs, the C/RFIS expert system automatically evaluates the collaborative activity of two peers, during their asynchronous, written, web-based collaboration. This information is used for the provision of adaptive support to peers during their collaboration, towards equilibrium of their collaborative activity. In particular, this enhanced formative feedback aims at diminishing the possible dissonance between the individual collaborative skills by challenging self-adjustment procedures. The proposed model extents the evaluation system of a web-based collaborative tool namely Lin2k, which has served as a test-bed for the C/R-FIS experimental use. Results from its experimental use have proved the potentiality of the proposed model to significantly contribute to the enhancement of the collaborative activity and its transferability to other collaborative learning contexts, such as medicine, environmental engineering, law, and music education.