A Collaborative Learning and Support System for STEM Education and Learning Analytics

STEM education encourages students to collaborate in learning. With the rapid progress of information technology, computer-supported collaborative learning becomes a powerful method to facilitate STEM education with promising learning outcomes. However, researchers and teachers lack an integrated CSCL system able to meet the following needs: (1) an integrated and ready-to-use instant messenger that can support a large number of users stably, (2) a secured and robust framework that allows embedding third-party learning tasks, (3) support for researchers to design research plans and for teachers to manage classes, (4) power mechanisms to capture, store and export learning process data. To address these requirements. This paper presents a powerful collaborative learning and support system (called CLASS) specifically designed to support learning, teaching, and research in collaborative learning. The CLASS system is web-based, and is compatible with third-party HTML5 applications, which can be embedded safely and smoothly into the system, communicate with the server, and interact with other interface elements. It has also integrated an instant messaging service that can support millions of users simultaneously with text, audio, and video conversations. Assessment data and learning process data are automatically recorded at the server, and can be easily exported for learning analytics research. Internationalizing functions are also employed for users with different language preferences.