Supporting collaborative exercises for distance education

At the German Distance Learning University, collaborative synchronous exercises have been recently identified by students and teachers as an important future form of collaborative learning in the university's virtual learning space. The main requirements of collaborative exercises in a distance learning university include support for preparation of exercises, learning group management, collaborative learning sessions, and learning management. We support such collaborative exercises in the FUB system by providing groupware tools for each phase of collaborative exercises. Especially important is the support of complex problem solving processes. Results of a trial use indicate that our approach works, and identify some needs further improvement. The implications of our approach and our experiences for the design of next generation learning platforms are discussed.