Incorporating Learning Styles in a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Model

Collaborative learning enables individual learners to combine their own expertise, experience and ability to accomplish a mutual learning goal. The grouping of learners, and learning from social interactions with peer-learners, are two basic characteristics of collaborative learning. For individual learners to benefit from collaborative learning, individual learners with different characteristics must be grouped together. In this paper, we propose a computer-supported collaborative learning model which incorporates learning styles for improving collaborative learning. The proposed model is novel since it can provide overall support for collaborative learning. In addition, the way we have incorporated learning styles in the model is a new approach to constituting heterogeneous groups containing learners with dissimilar learning styles and detect learning styles through monitoring collaborative interactions.