Management of Group Evolution through Cooperative Work in e/m-Learning Systems

The current economic crisis require several skills, such as becoming more and more capable to face new tasks in distinct contexts and being productive members of teams. These features should be developed since the first school years and become fundamental targets in education systems renewal. To this purpose, the role of teachers in educating young students to teamwork is crucial and a great help comes from relatively low-cost ICTs, which put appropriate devices, fast network access connections and powerful cooperative work tools at disposal. Advanced e/m-Learning environments and their services for remote group work, real-time or asynchronous can help teachers to define groups, check their performance in a continuous way, and manage team evolution and membership over time. The problem is here faced from three interacting viewpoints: firstly, some factors are presented, related to education systems renewal in the direction of ICT and cooperative work; secondly, such considerations are used to define criteria for profile evaluation of both individuals and groups. Lastly, an architecture is proposed for remote cooperative work management and optimization. In the considered scenario, the whole e/m-Learning system and its cooperative tools are accessed through heterogeneous devices and access network technologies. The system contains an adaptive testing component, for the continuous assessment of group activities and group evolution management, which makes use of the above mentioned profiles.