SUPPORTING COMPLEX COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

ACTIVITIES – THE LIBRESOURCE APPROACH

Olivera Marjanovic

, Hala Skaf-Molli

, Pascal Molli

, Fethi Rabhi

and Claude Godart

University of New South Wales,

Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

LORIA-INRIA

615, Rue du Jardin Botanique

Villers-lès-Nancy, 54600, FRANCE

Keywords: Collaborative work, eLearning, Learning Designs, Collaborative software design.

Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to describe collaborative technology called LibreSource and how it is

used to implement an innovative learning/teaching activity designed for software engineering students.

From the educational perspective, this educational activity is based on the principles of problem-based

learning and the latest Learning Design theory. The main objective of this activity to offer students a real-

life experience in collaborative software development. Compared to the popular Learning Management

Systems that only offer collaborative tools and support individual collaborative tasks, this technology

enables design and implementation of complex collaborative processes.

1 INTRODUCTION

In order to respond to various powerful internal and

external challenges, more and more universities

embark on the same journey called by different

names such as “e-learning”, “web-based learning”,

“flexible learning”, “on-line delivery” just to

mention several popular terms. Many universities do

it out of necessity to stay competitive, provide more

flexibility, potentially reduce costs, provide

alternative for mass lectures or out of interest or

commitment to enhance student learning.

Consequently, there is a great confusion in the

educational literature and practice as to what this

form of learning actually involves. Practical

applications range from simply “putting lecture

notes on the web” to very sophisticated web-based

tools.

As a starting point for further discussion, this

paper assumes that e-learning denotes learning

experience in online environment where student’s

learning is enabled and supported by educational

technology. This mode of learning provides any

time/any place learning and as such, does not

include face-to-face or on-campus learning

activities. On the other hand, the blended (also

called mixed or combined) mode of learning

combines face-to-face teaching learning experience

with online activities (e-learning). The concept of

blended learning is very powerful as it enables the

teachers to provide innovative learning activities to

supplement what they are already doing in the

classroom. Therefore, they can meaningfully extend

the learning activities between face-to-face lectures

and tutorials to re-enforce important points, give

supplementary activities but also encourage learning

community among students.

When carefully designed, blended learning can

offer to students the best of both worlds, face-to-face

and e-learning. However, this is not an easy task.

Very often, eager to move from traditional “teacher-

centered” learning, educators put too much emphasis

on technology and as a result create technology-

centered learning.

Consequently, technology is often used for

delivery of the content (i.e. as delivery machines)

rather than the tool that has a potential to enable new

forms of learning never before possible. The main

point is that technology itself does not result in

learning or as (Ehramann, 1997) correctly observed

the medium is not the message. Success or benefits

of a certain technology can be largely attributed to

the teaching methods used. At the same time,

technology is not irrelevant. Any particular

Marjanovic O., Skaf-Molli H., Molli P., Rabhi F. and Godart C. (2006).

SUPPORTING COMPLEX COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES – THE LIBRESOURCE APPROACH.

In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - SAIC, pages 59-65

DOI: 10.5220/0002489500590065

 SciTePress

technology can be well or poorly suited to support

the intended teaching and learning method. “There

may indeed be a choice of technologies for carrying

out a particular teaching task, but it isn’t necessarily

a large choice. There are several tools that can be

used to turn a screw, but most tools can’t do it, and

some that can are better for the job than the

others.”(Ehramann, 1997).

When designing activities for e-learning or

blended learning, another equally important problem

is learning methodology. There is the tendency to

transfer traditional teaching and learning methods

into new environments rather than invent the new

ones. A large number of on-line learning

environments are characterised by a narrowly

defined educational model that emphasises delivery

of materials and instructions rather than flexibility,

intellectual engagement, participation or progress of

individual learners.

The main objective of this paper is to describe an

innovative teaching/learning activity designed for

software engineering students and the actual

collaborative technology used for its

implementation. Although the main focus of this

paper is on collaborative technology, to design it, we

adopted the top-down approach and started from the

appropriate learning methodology. Thus, from the

educational perspective this activity is based on the

principles of problem-based learning and is designed

to offer students a real-life experience in

collaborative software development. To enable and

support this learning activity, we use the

collaborative environment called LibreSource (see

online reference). Compared to the currently

available learning management systems (such as

WebCT(see online reference)) that only offer

collaborative tools (e.g. forums and chat), this

technology enables and supports collaborative

processes.

The paper is structured as follows. The next

section will introduce a motivating example of the

intended teaching/learning activity and will place it

within the appropriate framework of the related

educational theories. Section 3 will give a brief

overview of LibreSource and the remainder of the

paper will focus on technical implementation of this

educational activity in LibreSource

2 MOTIVATING EXAMPLE

It has been widely recognised that one of the most

important skills that students should acquire during

their higher education today, is the ability to learn

how to learn. To help students build these skills, it is

necessary to engage them in carefully planned

process-oriented learning activities rather than

isolated learning tasks (Race, 1999). These activities

should include a number of inter-related learning

tasks that promote active learning through

collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving and

authentic interactions with the real-world problems.

Furthermore, by making students aware of the

processes they are participating in, we are actually

helping them to become more independent and self-

regulated learners.

It is also important to recognise that the majority

of students coming to universities these days are

already computer literate. The so-called “Nintendo”

generation is now in our classrooms. Obviously,

they have different expectations about their

learning/teaching experience and educational

technologies used to support it. This is especially

evident in the area of Information Systems/

Information technologies/ Computer Sciences

education where students want to see their teachers

practice “what they preach” both in the classroom

and in on-line environment.

To design this particular learning activity we

follow the approach proposed by the very recent

theory of learning designs (Koper and Tattarsell,

2005). Design of this theory has been an

international collaborative effort with the main

objective to enable conceptual representation of

learning/teaching scenarios, guided by pedagogy, so

they could be supported by educational technology,

but also shared among teachers. Therefore, design of

a particular learning design (i.e. teaching/learning

activity) starts from learning objectives and

identification of all activities that different

participants (students and their teacher(s)) need to do

in order to achieve these objectives. Then for each

activity, it is necessary to identify a set of learning

resources as well as possible educational technology

tools that could be used to support it. Adoption of

the principles of learning design theory ensures that

pedagogy guides all educational activities, rather

than the available educational resources or

technology.

Our example comes from the software

engineering teaching discipline. From the

educational perspective, the main objective of this

learning design is to enable students to experience

the process of collaborative software development.

At the same time, it is also very interesting to

observe that the underlying educational technology

serves dual purpose: to support the intended learning

activity but also to demonstrate an example of a

complex technology and its use to software

engineering students. So it could be used as an

object of study for future learning activities.

Suppose that a software engineering teacher is

interested in involving students in a software

ICEIS 2006 - SOFTWARE AGENTS AND INTERNET COMPUTING

development project. This is a common learning

activity, used in software engineering discipline, to

give students hands-on experience and exposure to

the real-life software development projects. It could

be used as a part of formative or summative

assessment. This teacher would also like to simulate

a real-life software development experience in a

team, so students are required to engage in

collaborative software development activities.

This particular learning design involves the

following activities. First of all, students are given a

real-life software engineering problem and to solve

it students are required to design and implement a

software solution (system). Students are divided into

teams and each team is required to collaborate and

come up with its own solution for the given

problem. To facilitate their collaboration, within

each team students assign different roles to different

members.

Obviously, the main challenge of this project is

design and development of a particular solution. In

order to complete it, students need to engage in

collaborative software development. Furthermore,

after all teams have completed their projects, the

teacher is interested in implementing the reflection

phase. This requires each team to reflect upon their

learning, rather than software development

experience. Note that reflection-in-action is a very

powerful learning activity, especially in the field of

design. This particular activity is very useful for

students to help them to become the so-called

“reflective practitioners” (Schon, 1983; Schon,

1987) as required by their future profession.

This paper will focus on educational technology

used to support the process of collaborative software

development that is at the core of the previously

described learning design. This process cannot be

effectively supported by the existing educational

technologies as they provide very simple tools (such

as forums, chat tools, electronic whiteboards) to

support individual tasks. Rather than simple tools, to

support the intended learning activity, we need to

provide a complex collaborative structure as

described in the next section

3 SUPPORTING COMPLEX

COLLABORATIVE

STRUCTURES

We see collaboration as a group activity of a large

number of participants (i.e. a community), designed

to achieve a particular purpose or goal. A

collaboration structure refers to an IT-enabled

solution that supports collaboration. Furthermore,

we define a complex collaboration structure as

consisting of a combination of several tools for

collaboration and communication being used

simultaneously.

The existing collaborative tools have reached

their limits when dealing with large-scale

collaboration structures, especially where several

media are used at the same time by a community (or

communities) of people. CSCW (Computer

Supported Cooperative Work) and groupware

platforms are supposed to support these types of

collaboration but they suffer from complexity, high

costs and rigidity (i.e. they do not adapt easily to

different types of environments).

Some companies propose commercial products

that group several tools together to support such

complex structures. Examples include BSCW

SourceForge, Lotus Notes (see corresponding online

references). However, they do not cover all facets of

collaboration. In addition, they are proprietary

systems, not so easy to deploy, and require solid

programming skills. Recently, there have been some

efforts at providing flexible and open collaboration

platforms (e.g. ZOPE (see online reference).

This paper introduces LibreSource that has been

specifically designed to support large-scale

collaboration structures that are customizable to a

wide range of needs and easy to use by non-

specialist users. In this context, we use LibreSource

as a platform designed to support collaborative

software development process as required by the

intended learning activity. Compared to the existing

tools in the same category (such as G-Forge and

Savannah (see online references), LibreSource offers

a high level of integration.

To facilitate understanding, a LibreSource server

behaves similarly to an ordinary file system. Thus, a

LibreSource server is a tree of instantiated

components. A component can be a forum, a project

or a bug tracker. As in the file system, each

component of the LibreSource Tree declares its own

security policy. However, unlike file systems, each

component can generate events that could be used

for the awareness and triggering purposes.

Data can be propagated from one server to

another by using the synchronization component

called So6. More precisely, So6 is a generic file

synchronizer (Molli et. al, 2003). It can be classified

as a configuration management tool that allows

synchronization with more than one repository. This

is a very important feature that allows

implementation of synchronization networks. In

turn, these networks allow representation of

dataflow processes.

So6 component can be easily applied to enable

implementation of the classical software process that

SUPPORTING COMPLEX COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES – THE LIBRESOURCE APPROACH

consists of development, test and release activities

(as illustrated by Figure 1)

Figure 1: Software development process in LibreSource.

The graphical notation uses two different

LibreSource components: Queues (depicted by

oblongs) and Workspaces (depicted as circles).

Each Queue contains n operations i.e. queue Q3

contains 200 operations. Workspaces generate

changes (called operations) and commit them to

queues. They also update changes from the

associated queues. A number of commit/update

operations between a workspace and a particular

queue is depicted as the label of the corresponding

double arrow.

Note that a workspace can be connected to several

queues. For example, workspace 8 is connected to

queues Q3, Q4 and Q5. It has been updated by the

first 159 changes coming from Q3 and is up-to-date

with Q4 and Q5. Workspaces 5, 6 and 7 are also

connected to Queue Q3. At the same time

workspaces 5 and 7 are updated with the changes

coming from the Q1 and Q2.

A workspace can commit operations to a queue

only if it is up-to-date with this queue. This solution

prevents the problem of lost updates. On the other

hand, when a workspace is updated with changes

from the associated queue, all incoming operations

and local operations are merged using the

operational transformation algorithm (Molli et.al.,

2003). Furthermore, So6 ensures data convergence

i.e. when all workspaces are up-to-date with all

changes they will contain the same data.

Therefore, when using So6, users of the

workspaces commit the stream of changes that will

be propagated to different queues. For example, in

Figure 1, suppose that the user of workspace 8 is

responsible for data propagation between

development, test and release. Therefore, workspace

8 will be updated with the changes issued by the

development queue and submit them to the test

queue. If testers agree with the proposed solutions,

they will commit operations to the Release queue.

On the other hand, if testers report bugs, changes

representing code fragments will be committed back

to the developer queue.

Each queue can be hosted on a different

LibreSource server. So, developers can have their

own LibreSource server, testers another one, while

the release queue can be hosted on a special server

that can support the heavy load. Thus, each

community can have its own LibreSource server and

development:200

Test:100

Release:10

9 11

Lib1:23

Lib2:12

12 12

200

159

1023

159

100

10 10

Figure 2: Developers’ Workspaces in LibreSource.

ICEIS 2006 - SOFTWARE AGENTS AND INTERNET COMPUTING

configure it for their own needs. Combined with

forums, wiki and bugtrackers, LibreSource

components can support complex collaboration

structures

4 IMPLEMENTATION OF

COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE

DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITY

This section illustrates the implementation of a

complex collaboration structure using LibreSource,

based on the motivating example introduced in

Section 2 . We assume that each team of software

engineering students is developing a software

system called XYZ. Just like in a professional

software development scenario, this system goes

through several stages of development, beta testing

and release activities. The following process is

adopted by all participants to coordinate their efforts

in the project:

Suppose that there are 3 developers each working

on his/her own workspace developing the assigned

components of XYZ software system (as depicted by

Figure 2).

• A queue Developer is used to propagate

changes from one developer’s version to

another (Figure 3).

• When ready, the new version of XYZ is

propagated for Beta testing (through

operation Commit). We assume that this

operation is restricted to few users only (e.g.

members of the same student team)

Figure 3: Propagation of changes from Developer queue.

• Then, each user at a beta testing site can have

access to the new XYZ’s version using another

queue resource Beta (through operation Update).

• As in the real-life software development scenario,

there could be many iterations through which

different beta versions are produced. Before the

queue Resource is used, only updates are

propagated to the beta users.

• At some stage, the latest version of XYZ is

released to users (all members of the software

development team). They can obtain it by

invoking operation Update on another queue

resource called Release.

• Developers communicate with each other using a

bug tracker resource. Changes and bugs are

reported from users back to developers via the

forum resource.

Figure 4 illustrates the synchronization dataflow

between Developer, Beta and Release queues used by So6.

The figure is generated from the real implementation of

this example with LibreSource.

Figure 4: Synchronisation dataflow between Developer,

Beta and Release queues.

This software development process can be made even

more complex by involving more participants in the

project, setting different security policies, adding

archiving mechanisms etc.

For example, each developer can manage more than

one workspace if he/she is using a home computer, a work

computer and a laptop for developments of XYZ. In this

case, another queue resource and several workspaces are

added in place of their original workspace. It is important

to point out that participants are allowed to modify their

resource tree to suit their needs (providing that they have

the right permissions to do so). This is one of the features

that make LibreSource suitable for large-scale

collaboration projects.

Finally, from the educational perspective, this software

development learning/teaching activity can be made more

complex by using different collaborative scenarios. For

example, it is possible to get students from one group to

test solutions of another group and report back the

SUPPORTING COMPLEX COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES – THE LIBRESOURCE APPROACH

problems. Furthermore, the same solution can be used in

other teaching/learning scenarios to support for example

collaborative writing of an assignment. However, code

development and the associated design methods make

collaborative software development much more complex

than writing simple text. This is why this particular

solution is tailor-made for software engineering students

engaged in collaborative development of any type of

software system.

5 A QUICK TOUR OF

LIBRESOURCE SERVER

A LibreSource implementation server can be accessed

through a Web browser such as Internet Explorer or

Mozilla. During navigation, LibreSource may prompt the

user to download some Java programs. In this case, the

user should choose the option “Open File” instead of

“Sav

e File”.

Figure 5 shows the home page of the server

LibreSource.loria.fr. In this figure, we can see some

generic information associated with every resource

e.g.:

• The resource tree path is shown on the top

left side of the window. Each resource is

uniquely named and can be include

d as a

reference in other resources (e.g. a Wiki page can

be made to point to a workspace or another Wiki

page).

• Login information on the top right, showing who

is logged in or a login menu (if no one has logged

in yet).

• The top line shows some generic operations that

can be performed on the resource tree. At this

stage, we can only list the children of a particular

resource in the tree.

• The left and middle windows contain user-defined

text, menus, links, that provide easy access to

resources such as projects, information etc.

located on this server.

After logging, users can navigate through any of the

links provided. As most pages are Wiki-enabled, so users

can also modify the content of these pages (providing they

have the right permissions). The LibreSource evaluation

package is available online.

6 CONCLUSION

The main objectives of this paper were twofold: (i)

to illustrate an innovative teaching/learning activity

designed for software engineering students and (ii)

to describe how this activity can be supported by

collaborative technology called LibreSource.

Although the main focus of this paper is on

collaborative technology, we argue that when

technology is used in the education domain, it is

necessary to adopt the top-down approach. Thus, it

is necessary to start from the intended learning

objectives and learning designs and then look for

possible technical solutions. Design of this activity

is based on the latest theory of learning designs and

principles of problem-based learning.

The same educational activity could be further

extended to support more complex scenarios. For

example, it could support peer review process where

one group of students test solutions developed by

Resource tree

ath

Resource children nodes

in information

Links to

other

resources

Figure 5: LibreSource home page.

ICEIS 2006 - SOFTWARE AGENTS AND INTERNET COMPUTING

other groups. Furthermore, the same collaborative

technology can be used in other, non-technical,

disciplines to support, for example, collaborative

writing of an assignment. Our current and future

work include further development of LibreSource

technology and its application to collaborative

activities in the domain of eLearning, business and

software engineering.

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SUPPORTING COMPLEX COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES – THE LIBRESOURCE APPROACH