Keywords

1 Learning Design

Collaboration is a key aspect of learning: learners engaged in collaborative activities are involved in a process of co-construction of knowledge based on meaning negotiation, sharing and reinforcement. Online Collaborative Learning, in particular, is believed to hold the promise to implement socio-constructivist learning processes based on active learning, collaborative knowledge building, reflection triggered by multiple perspectives. However, effective design of collaborative learning activities is not an easy task, especially for teachers and instructors who are not familiar with Learning Design (LD). In this context, a variety of tools, both conceptual and technological, has been proposed in literature [1,2,3,4,5]; these tools provide support to some specific design tasks, ranging from the planning of student activities to their delivery of learning resources and instructions.

Unfortunately, very few tools support the creative process of conceptualizing collaborative tasks, although many teachers and designers, even experienced ones, face significant problems when addressing this task. The reason for this lack of support can be found in the level of creativity required by the conceptualization process, and in its intrinsic complexity, thus making it hard to reduce the design activity to a sequence of predetermined steps. Consequently, existing LD tools seldom have a significant impact on teachers’ practice and therefore encounter limited adoption [6,7,8].

For these reasons, [9] proposed a collaborative board game aimed at supporting the design of game-based learning scenarios. Not only did teachers enjoyed using it, but also their collaborative attitude and creativity improved by playing with the cards: interacting with tangible elements allowed for more flexibility and usability than usual digital environments devoted to LD development. One drawback of such a paper-only approach is in the lack of saving and retrieving facilities, as it is difficult for participants to continue working on their collaborative design at a distance, or in a later session. Above all, the result of the design effort cannot be easily exported to an LMS platform to be deployed in a learning environment [9].

We have therefore developed three versions of a serious game, all based on the 4Ts Model [10], to support groups of teachers in the design of collaborative learning activities. We have been exploring various combinations of tangible and digital mix-ins: initially the game was fully tangible; we subsequently developed an “augmented”, half-tangible-half-digital, version of the game [4]. In its most recent implementation, the game is completely digital, and allows for the direct manipulation of software representations of cards on a board through a gaming interface. In the following, we will present the 4Ts Model, and describe the digital version of the game.

2 The 4Ts Model

The 4Ts model was developed in 2011 and then validated during a workshop conducted at the Alpine Rendez-Vous of the STELLAR Network of Excellence [11, 12], which was attended by a number of researchers active in the field of learning design and online collaborative learning.

The model addresses four main dimensions of the design of collaborative learning activities [10]:

  • The Task learners should carry out (e.g., writing a report, solving a problem etc.)

  • The Team(s) that learners should be grouped into to carry out the Task and the corresponding interaction mode(s): pairs, small groups, plenary class etc.

  • The Time schedule learners should adopt

  • The Technology needed to carry out the Task (e.g., forum, wiki etc.)

During the design process of a collaborative learning activity, designers make decisions about these four dimensions, on the basis of the following boundary conditions (see Fig. 1):

Fig. 1.
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The four dimensions of the model

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  • the expected learning outcomes, i.e. the learning objectives pursued by the activity;

  • the content domain addressed in the learning activity;

  • various contextual constraints, such as: the number of students who will take part in the activity, their age, previous competences, special needs; timeline restrictions; particular characteristics of the working or operative environment, etc.

The four dimensions of the model are not mutually independent: rather, they are tightly intertwined: a decision regarding any of them inevitably influences all the others. To support teacher and designers in the decision making process involved in LD, these dependencies should be made explicit. To this end, the game based on the 4Ts Model aims to support players in the exploration of these four dimensions.

As we shall see in the following, we have also identified a well-defined pattern language, in order to allow novice teachers to build their design on pre-defined structures rather than from scratch.

3 The Game

The game is hosted on a board that represents Time on four columns, each corresponding to a week (see Fig. 2). Each column has slots to accommodate cards from five different decks [13]:

Fig. 2.
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The Board structure

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  • The Task deck (red cards): possible assignments for the students

  • The Team deck (yellow cards): possible group structures

  • The Technology deck (green cards): possible kinds of device, either hardware of software, to support the learners activity. Currently, the game only allows for a maximum of two technology boxes per task; in the future, we might explore the possibility to specify more than two technologies for each task.

  • The Technique deck (blue cards): possible collaborative patterns.

Each column can contain one Technique card, and one or two activity specifications; each activity consists of one Task card, one Team card and one or two Technology cards.

Regardless the deck they belong to, all cards share the same structure: they contain a short definition of the element they represent, and highlight suitable associations with other cards. For instance, the Forum card (belonging to the Technology deck) suggests compatible team and task arrangements that learners can effectively perform using a discussion forum.

Please note that the board allocates some space (on the left side of Fig. 2) to text fields that designers should fill in with information about the context, the objectives and the content domain associated to the activity under design. As already stated (see Fig. 1), these boundary conditions heavily affect most design decisions, and should therefore remain visible to designers throughout the conceptualization phase.

3.1 The Card Decks

Figure 3 shows an example of for each type of card, namely a “Writing a report” task, a “Small Groups” team, and a “Forum” technology card. Tables 1, 2, and 3 describe the sets of Task, Team, and Technology cards, respectively.

Fig. 3.
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Examples of Task, Team and Technology cards

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Table 1. The set of task (red) cards.
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Table 2. The set of team (yellow) cards.
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Table 3. The set of technology (green) cards.
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3.2 How Participants Play the Game

A group of designers play the game with the goal of designing one or more collaborative learning activities: after having defined learning objectives, contents and constraints of the activity, designers read and analyse the available cards, discuss, negotiate among the group the proper design decisions, and select appropriate cards to lay down on the board. Card after card, a coherent description of the learning activity emerges from the board.

The design resulting from a session of the 4Ts paper game consists in the state of the board, with all the technique, task, and technology cards properly positioned in the board slots.

Figure 4 shows an example of the status of the game board during a design session. Participants have planned for the first week a task consisting in a web search students will carry out in small groups over a set of referenced web sites. During the second week, larger groups will be preparing slide presentations to deliver to the whole class.

Fig. 4.
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The status of the board during a design session

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3.3 Scaffolding for Novice Designers

A fourth type of cards, namely the Technique cards, is particularly useful to provide some scaffolding for participants who are novice in the CSCL field, because these cards allow starting the design from an existing pattern, rather than from scratch.

Techniques allow the organization, structuring, and scaffolding of activities, so that students who will take part in the activity being designed, will be able to collaborate effectively in order to achieve the expected learning outcomes. Techniques cards provide the elements for the pattern language we have mentioned in a previous section: each Technique card (blue colored) represents and suggests a notable collaborative pedagogical design patterns. The Technique card deck includes the following elements, but this set is open to future extensions and integrations:

  • JIGSAW

  • PEER REVIEW

  • CASE STUDY

  • PYRAMID

    • FOR LIST PREPARATION

    • FOR PROBLEM SOLVING

  • DISCUSSION

    • TOWARDS ASSIGNMENT

    • TOWARDS ARTEFACT

    • TOWARDS REPORT

  • ROLE PLAY

3.4 An Example of Technique Card: Jigsaw

As an example of a Technique [14], let us consider the Jigsaw pattern, a research-based cooperative learning technique invented and developed in the early 1970s by Elliot Aronson and his students at the University of Texas and the University of California [15, 16].

A Jigsaw activity comprises two phases:

  • In phase 1 a complex issue is subdivided into 4-5 segments; learners form small groups, each group addressing one segment so that each member of the group becomes “expert” in that segment.

  • In phase 2 groups are broken and reshaped, so that in each new group there is at least one “expert” for each segment of the previous phase: each group includes all the knowledge to solve the whole original issue.

The Jigsaw organization can be depicted as in Fig. 5:

Fig. 5.
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Group articulation in the Jigsaw classroom.

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Table 4 below shows how a Jigsaw activity can be represented within the 4Ts Model.

Table 4. The Jigsaw in 4Ts perspective.
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Figure 6 below shows the Technique card representing the first phase of the Jigsaw pattern. Note that, beside a short description of the technique, the card suggests proper task, team, technology, and time options. These are just hints, as several different combinations of 4T cards may suitably implement the technique.

Fig. 6.
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A Jigsaw – Phase 1 Technique card.

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Figure 7 shows the status of the board after that participants have fully defined a Jigsaw activity.

Fig. 7.
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The board for Jigsaw

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4 System Functionality

As outlined before, the digital implementation of the game offers some valuable advantages over the initial, cardboard-only version. The software system that implements the game can perform a number of checks on players’ moves, provide on-demand feedback, support multiple sessions and playing at a distance, and allow for subsequent deployment of the designed activity.

Whenever participants place a new card on the board, the system checks the board status to assess its consistency. Some combinations of cards are not allowed because do not make sense (e.g., an individual learner using a videoconferencing system, or because a task card that is incompatible with the technique card specified for the same week). In these cases, the system points out the incompatibility, as shown in the example of Fig. 8.

Fig. 8.
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The system highlights an incompatible combination of cards: the first phase of the Pyramid technique cannot be carried out in small groups.

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If technique cards have been used, participants can also ask the system to check if the technique has been fully specified.

If participants are stuck and do not know how to proceed, they can ask the system for suggestions: given the current status of the board, what card could be laid in a given slot?

The system produces a persistent, computational representation of the design. It is therefore possible to record and re-build easily the contents of the board at any given time, to allow for session break and resume.

Being the result of the conceptualization phase, the board final state should be easily reusable as the input to tools that support the design process; with this respect, the computational representation of the board allows for the integration of the 4Ts Game with other LD tools, in order to cover the whole design lifecycle [17].

5 System Architecture

The architecture of the augmented 4Ts Game encompasses three layers. The layer at the top represents the user interface: board and cards. The middle layer is in charge of the business logic: system initialization, persistency management, syntax checks, output formatting etc. Finally, the knowledge base at the bottom is responsible for representing the rules of the game (as outlined in the cards) and performing the semantic checks.

Queries to the knowledge base perform the following:

  1. 1.

    Correctness check: does the board currently contain a correct combination of cards?

  2. 2.

    Completeness check: does the board currently contain a complete combination of cards?

  3. 3.

    Card(s) suggestion

The user interface layer is implemented in Unity™ [18]. The middle layer is implemented in C#, whereas queries and responses returned to the business logic are expressed in XML syntax. The knowledge base is implemented in Prolog; thanks to the decoupling offered by an HTTP-based interface, the knowledge base sub-system can be located in a separate network node (e.g., a server in the cloud). This also allows for the collection of experimental data to validate the usability of the system and its pedagogical effectiveness.

The implementation of the digital game is in its final stages, with prototypes undergoing extensive testing.

6 Conclusions and Future Developments

The 4Ts game aims to scaffold the design of collaborative learning in Technology Enhanced Learning environments by making explicit, through the Technique, Task, Team and Technology cards and the board representing Time, the (mostly tacit) knowledge that expert designers have developed through experience. As a consequence, the game is particularly suited to the training of designers with little experience in the design of CSCL activities. In this context, one of the limitations of the game (the limited flexibility of its knowledge base) is also an asset, because it provides guidance based on clear-cut rules and consolidated design patterns. For experienced designers, however, this lack of flexibility could become too restrictive of their creativity in the design of innovative teaching approaches.

Future research directions include validation experiments of the game in authentic situations; usability evaluation of the interface with both real users and experts; comparison of the digital game with previous paper-only and mixed-tangible versions.