Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / 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. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers: Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than in the software designer’s.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / 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. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers: Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than in the software designer’s.