Towards a Smart Learning Management System (smart-LMS) to Improve Collaborative Learning in Higher Education

Abstract

With the increasing number of higher education students using e-learning technology, collaborative learning has been suggested as a solution to the lack of sufficient support to learners in e-learning environments, particularly LMS (Learning Management System). Nevertheless, current collaborative learning puts a heavy emphasis on group discussion, but provides inadequate support for individual learners to promote teamwork during the whole learning process. The aim of this paper is to propose an intelligent LMS able to improve student's collaboration practices in higher education. The system provides teachers information about the levels of collaboration and productivity of each student and group; and as a result, teachers exploit data provided to promote collaborative learning, avoid students' isolation and motivate them to use collaboration tools. The intelligent LMS called "smart-Cloud Collaborative LMS" integrates a Multi-Agents System (MAS) responsible to the tracking of collaboration and productivity levels of each student and group. On the other hand, in order to optimize the large-scale resource management, the proposed smart-Cloud Collaborative LMS is based on a cloud computing architecture.