Title : 
A Replication-Based Approach for the Improvement of the Online Learning Experience in Distributed Environments
         
        
            Author : 
Caballe, Santi ; Xhafa, Fatos ; Abraham, Ajith
         
        
            Author_Institution : 
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Multimedia, & Telecommun., Open Univ. of Catalonia, Barcelona
         
        
        
        
        
        
            Abstract : 
Modern on-line collaborative learning environments need to be continuously adapted, adjusted, and personalized to each specific target learning group. Moreover, these environments are to enable and scale the involvement of an increasing large number of single/group participants who can geographically be widely distributed, and who need transparently share a huge variety of both software and hardware distributed resources. As a result, collaborative learning applications need to be designed in a way that overcome important non-functional requirements arisen in distributed contexts, such as scalability, availability, interoperability, and integration of different, heterogeneous, and legacy collaborative learning systems. In this paper, an innovative distributed-based approach is presented for increasing the overall performance of collaborative learning systems that contributes to the effectiveness of the collaborative activities, such as online discussions. The experimental results show an outstanding effect on the learning processes and outcomes by enhancing and improving the learning experience a great deal.
         
        
            Keywords : 
computer aided instruction; groupware; collaborative activities; collaborative learning systems; distributed environments; hardware distributed resources; learning processes; nonfunctional requirements; online collaborative learning; software distributed resources; Application software; Availability; Collaborative work; Competitive intelligence; Computer networks; Computer vision; Distributed computing; Grid computing; Large-scale systems; Scalability;
         
        
        
        
            Conference_Titel : 
Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems, 2009. CISIS '09. International Conference on
         
        
            Conference_Location : 
Fukuoka
         
        
            Print_ISBN : 
978-1-4244-3569-2
         
        
            Electronic_ISBN : 
978-0-7695-3575-3
         
        
        
            DOI : 
10.1109/CISIS.2009.18