EDUCO: Social Navigation and Group Formation in Student-Centred E-Learning

EDUCO is a system that enhances the sense of other users in a collaborative learning environment by making the other users and their navigation visible to everyone else in the environment in real-time. This article presents EDUCO and empirical results from two university courses where EDUCO was used as a learning environment. In the first study we utilized the logged data for observing the effects of social navigation; in the second study we analyzed the formation of groups. The results of the first study do no indicate a heavy reliance on social navigation but suggest that real-time social navigation can have a positive impact on the feeling of a learning community in a web-course. The results from the second study suggest that group formation does not affect the grades received, even if the motivational profiles of the students are different. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]