A Collaborative Design Tool to Support Learning Environments During Emergent Remote Learning

Abstract

This paper introduces Diagramar, a collaborative design tool that supports teachers and students in the creation and monitoring of collaborative artifacts, such as Entity-Relationship models or conceptual maps. Teachers can create and share a template with the information needed for students to work in a collaborative activity. Students can access a template and collaborate by adding elements to solve the activity. During the activity, teachers can visit real-time participation charts to monitor students' progress. We illustrate the usability of this tool in a pilot study. One teacher from the Database Systems course at ESPOL University was invited to use the Diagramar tool. Fifty-one students, distributed in groups of 2 to 4 participants, used the tool for designing a database for three different business models during three weeks. After, students were invited to fill in the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire and express their opinions about features they liked, features they did not like, and improved features. Twenty-seven students answered the questionnaire, and their results showed a higher acceptance, suggesting an easier adoption for regular classes. Students also expressed improvements and new features for the tool, which will be considered in the next iteration of the tool's development.