Collaborative e-learning through drag & share in synchronous shared workspaces

Abstract

E-Learning platforms allow users to collaborate with one other. Moodle, as one of the main e-Learning platforms, provides tools to perform collaborative tasks. With these tasks, students are able to share documents and information. The means provided by Moodle are not enough to perform some collaborative tasks, such as sharing documents in real-time. In this scenario users must be aware of what is happening in the system effectively. We propose the use of Drag & Share within Moodle, a collaborative tool that allows users to synchronously share resources in real-time. Through this tool, teachers are able to easily provide a shared workspace for students and be able to create groups. With such a tool, students can share all kind of resources and be aware of what is going on in the system in which they are participating and of what they are doing. All these features use standard technologies, such as HTML5.

This research has been partially supported by the CICYT TIN2011-27767-C02-01 project and the regional projects with reference PAI06-0093-8836 and PII2C09-0185-1030.