Volume 3 Issue 2
Authors: Barbara Mavì Masini; Cristina De Castro
Abstract: The current economic crisis require people to have several skills, such as becoming more and more capable of facing new tasks in distinct contexts and being productive members of teams. These features should be developed since the first school year and become fundamental targets in education system’s renewal. To this purpose, the role of teachers in educating young students to work as teams is crucial and a great help comes from relatively low-cost technologies, appropriate devices, fast network access connections and powerful cooperative work tools at disposal. Advanced e/m-Learning environments and their services for remote group work, real-time or asynchronous, can help teachers to define groups, check their performance in a continuous way, and manage team evolution and membership over time. The problem faced here is from three interacting viewpoints: firstly, some factors are presented, related to education systems renewal in the direction of ICT and cooperative work; secondly, such considerations are used to define criteria for profile evaluation of both individuals and groups. Lastly, a framework is proposed for remote cooperative work management and optimization. In the considered scenario, the whole e/m-Learning system and its cooperative tools are accessed through heterogeneous devices and access network technologies. The system contains an adaptive testing component, for the continuous assessment of group activities and group evolution management, which makes use of the above mentioned profiles.
Keywords: Education Systems; Remote Cooperative Work; Profiles; Heterogeneous Access Technologies; Group Evolution