Abstract
Designing successful collaborative learning activities is a new focus of research within
the E-Learning community. The social dimension inside the traditional face-to-face
collaborative learning is important and must be included in the online learning designs. In
this thesis, we introduce the concept of Pedagogical Application Frameworks, and
describe Beehive, a pedagogical application framework for synchronous collaborative
learning. Beehive guides teachers in reusing online collaborative learning activities based
on well-known pedagogical designs, to accomplish their educational objectives within a
certain educational setting, and also simplifies the development of new pedagogical
collaboration designs. Beehive’s conceptual model has four abstraction layers:
Pedagogical Techniques, Collaboration Task patterns, CSCL Components, and CSCL
script. By following the framework’s guidelines and specifications, developers will place
the control of designing pedagogical collaboration tools in the teacher’s hand rather than
in the software designer’s.