Facilitating Shared Knowledge Construction in Collaborative Learning

The German distance learning university uses the web-based collaborative learning platform CURE to support different collaborative learning scenarios, e.g. collaborative exercises or virtual seminars. During these scenarios students form learning groups upon teacher's request and collaborate on a common task. But as soon as the given tasks are accomplished, in most times the collaboration stagnates and finally stops. In this paper, we report on extensions to CURE that were designed to foster shared knowledge construction and allow learning in a entertaining way. These extensions were developed in a participatory process with the students. To enable the students to design and develop these extensions, we used patterns for computer-mediated interaction. In our opinion, these entertaining extensions will lead to a higher degree of interaction between the students which leads to a shared knowledge and finally a learning community.