Sagittarius: A tool to enhance the collaboratibe work in virtual learning environments

Online teaching courses are becoming an appealing alternative to traditional in-class learning methods, therefore driving practitioners to explore new strategies for delivering contents to an overwhelming number of students. Nevertheless, migrating face-to-face learning methodologies to an online teaching environment is certainly challenging. More specifically, collaborative work, which provides valuable learning outcomes in classroom-based environments, is apparently unable to meet the online paradigm due to its intrinsic specificities: widely heterogeneous profiles, considerably large numbers of subscribers, scarcely balanced and doubtfully relevant feedback concerning students´ progress, and poorly conducted personal attention facilities. The purpose of this paper is to introduce Sagittarius, a novel Open Educational Resource that uses data mining techniques to overcome such limitations. This open-source software enables building reliable and effective working groups in order to boost the learning experience of online courses by means of collaborative work. Collected observations on the Computer Engineering field show the feasibility of our approach and encourage practitioners to focus their efforts on this direction.