Collaborative activity developed by students in the course “Herramientas Informáticas en Ciencias Experimentales" was accomplished during the practical sessions even though the students also worked at home in order to develop a final project. In the first session, students organized themselves in working groups. This task was difficult for them because they had to schedule and coordinate different timetables. Besides, they had to register each student in the group in the BSCW platform which requires his/her e-mail address. On the other hand, the platform controls the different shared work spaces by organizing them as folders of a group in an specific course. The folders can contain documents, images, Web links, multimedia objects, discussions, calendars, searches, information about the members of the group, personal Websites, ...
Practical face-to-face sessions last for two hours and they are distributed along the four months of the course (approximately one session per week). Previous to each practical session, professors provide students with material on the topic to be dealt with, a script for the collaborative work and software to be used by means of the BSCW platform. The collaborative projects defined by professors are about different issues and require different levels of depth.
Each working group must generate one or more documents depicting the work done during their session, being submitted at the end of this. The generated documents must be uploaded in the BSCW platform and can be consulted, discussed and reviewed after the session by the members of the group or the members of the rest of groups. The BSCW platform provides a exhaustive control of the different access and events. Later, these documents are assessed by the professors and sometimes by other groups selected randomly, due to the large amount of information generated.
The final products of each group are uploaded in another repository of the BSCW platform and a forum with different issues is created for each product to discuss about the work done. In addition, face-to-face sessions are scheduled in order to allow each group of students to make a presentation about the work done and share the knowledge and skills acquired during its realization. At this point, it is important to emphasize that along with the realization of the work, students can also have online and face-to-face tutoring sessions. Moreover, their work is evaluated weekly by professors or other working groups by means of BSCW platform (Alejandre-Marco & Allueva-Pinilla, 2007; Alejandre-Marco et al., 2008).
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