Opportunities and Challenges for Adaptive Collaborative Support in Distributed Learning Environments: Evaluating the GLUE! Suite of Tools Anastasios Karakostas Department of Informatics Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki, Greece akarakos@csd.auth.gr Luis P. Prieto, Yannis Dimitriadis School of Telecommunications Engineering University of Valladolid Valladolid, Spain lprisan@gsic.uva.es, yannis@tel.uva.es Abstract— Adaptive Collaborative Scripting systems provide learning benefits by adapting leaner scaffolding to the students and their current context. However, their development is still in its infancy and they are not widespread in the Technology Enhanced Learning TEL practice, which often uses VLEs like Moodle and other Web 2.0 tools. In order to assess the feasibility of applying the ACS approach on a larger scale, this paper presents the initial results of a short-term evaluation of the GLUE! suite of tools. The main goal of this specific evaluation process was to identify possible opportunities and ideas on how to design and deploy adaptive Computer- Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) activities using widespread VLEs and Web 2.0 tools in order to maximise community acceptance and lower development efforts. The main findings of the evaluation provide incentive to further explore both the impact and the complexity of the design and the deployment of adaptive collaboration scripts. Keywords-Computer-supported collaborative learning; adaptive collaboration scripts; CLUE!; flow patterns; I. INTRODUCTION In technology-enhanced education there exist currently two trends that are shaping the way educational institutions (especially higher education) use technology to support learning, most often when they follow blended learning approaches. On the one hand, Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs [1]), such as Moodle, or Personal Learning Environments (PLEs [2]) are employed in order to centralize the access to the learning activities. On the other hand, so-called “Web 2.0” tools (such as wikis, blogs, online collaborative tools such as GoogleDocs) are also becoming widespread in technology-enhanced education [3]. The clash of these two trends has recently prompted an interest in research and development regarding the integration of VLEs/PLEs and external Web 2.0 tools [4]. This heterogeneous technological landscape with central learning environments plus external tools has been labeled by some authors “distributed learning environments” (DLEs [5]). This study evaluates one of such DLEs, from the point of view of adaptive collaboration support, to exemplify main challenges and opportunities of that approach in this kind of technological background, which is becoming increasingly common. Adaptive collaboration support (ACS) has become the focus of intense research efforts in the CSCL domain [6]. Various researchers have experimented using dynamic supportive mechanisms, in order to provide more flexible and efficient forms of group support. One important form of collaboration support is the collaboration script [7]. Collaboration scripts are didactic scenarios that specify the way in which learners interact with one another [8]. Conventionally, CSCL scripts correspond to fixed ways of didactic and computational support to collaborative learning. In other words, they provide the same level of support for all students. This kind of support may be unnecessary for students who have good internal collaboration scripts or who are already experienced collaborators, and thus may lead to “overscripting” drawbacks [9]. Moreover, scripting has been criticized for its loss of flexibility (difficulty of modifying a script in run time according to the needs of the instructional situation) [10]. Using adaptive techniques into the fixed collaboration scripts may be an improvement over fixed techniques. Adaptive interventions tailor the collaborative learning process to the needs of the individual students or groups. Moreover, these techniques provide the opportunity for flexible reactions to expected and/or unexpected events that occur during the script enactment [11]. However, systems that adaptively support collaboration (1) are strongly related to a specific domain of instruction and cannot in general be used in another domain; (2) use advanced Artificial Intelligence methods for making inferences on the collaborative situation and providing support [6]. Then, how could we apply and evaluate the benefits of ACS to the increasingly common context of DLE systems? One significant example of DLE systems that reflect the fusion of the VLEs/PLEs and the external Web 2.0 tools, corresponds to the Sofocles or GLUE! [12] (after the project or the architecture names of this initiative) suite of tools which focuses on collaborative learning. We believe that it is rather important for the CSCL community to evaluate these type of tools under the perspective of adaptive and flexible interventions as another research direction torwards the design and development of ACS systems. Through the evaluation of the GLUE! suite of tools, we explore in what degree it is feasible to integrate adaptive collaboration support to distributed learning environments. In the following sections, we present briefly: (a) the main tools that