Enhancing Team Projects Using an Event-Triggered Knowledge Network

Abstract

Across the disciplines and levels of education, team projects are becoming an increasingly important tool for assessment. However, it is often difficult to make sure that work is fairly distributed, that a reasonable schedule is formed which does not leave everything for the last minute, and that individual students are fairly rewarded/penalized for their respective contributions. To solve these problems, we can model a project using events, rules, and workflows. Depending on the nature of an event, an appropriate rule can be triggered, which can subsequently initiate a workflow that will assign specific tasks to specific roles within the team. Events that occur over the course of the project, fired from a variety of sources, can lead to the derivation of new knowledge, and potentially alter the flow of the team’s activities. An integration of mobile devices into the system can insure that students are always aware of the current state of the system and their roles within it. At the conclusion and at all prior points in the project lifecycle, a comprehensive log of each student’s activities will be available and will greatly simplify the task of assigning fair and accurate grades. The result will be a more educational, more equitable, and far more engaging learning experience.

Keywords

• Collaborative Learning
• Event-Triggered
• Rule Processing
• Workflow Learning
• m-Learning