Sharing Synchronous Collaborative Learning Structures using IMS Learning Design

Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within the e-learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. There have been a number of projects that enable designing and implementing online activates, yet these projects are based on asynchronous collaborative technology. Designing asynchronous collaborative learning is applied on activates that take place over long period of time such as, group projects, PBL, etc but not for short term activities that are based on pedagogical techniques (Brainstorm, Debate, Buzz group, etc). However, generic synchronous tools are not always appropriate or sufficient for implementing the wide range of face-to-face pedagogical techniques in the online environment. These techniques might have complex internal structures associated with different roles. Therefore, there is an obvious need to structure and describe the synchronous collaborative learning in a formal way