Supporting Context-Aware Collaborative Learning Activities by CAFCLA - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 58

important problem when areas where context information is different are close
(e.g., two paintings in a museum).
The review of the literature evidences some lacks in the Context-aware Learn-
ing systems proposed until now. Even some works try to combine different tech-
nologies to cover as much situations as possible [16], teachers are not able to
choose different activities to implement or feel free to determine collaborations
between students. Moreover, the technology complexity is not transparent to
teachers, who are responsible to design the learning activity. Those solutions are
focused on the technological part of the problem and do not take into considera-
tion what teachers should do to design the learning process. Next section presents
an example of use of CAFCLA that illustrates how this framework takes into con-
sideration the teachers' point of view when designing a context-aware collabora-
tive learning activity.

3 CAFCLA Scenario

CAFCLA (Context-Aware Framework for Collaborative Learning Applications) is
a framework focused on the design, development and deployment of collaborative
learning applications that make use of contextual information [9]. CAFCLA
involves multiple users and characterizes each one according to their role in the
design, development, deployment and implementation of a learning activity.
Moreover, CAFCLA takes into consideration all aspects surrounding the whole
learning process design. These aspects include the objectives or goals that students
must reach, the contents of the learning activity, the teaching resources available,
the physical or virtual spaces selected or the assessment and activity monitoring.
All these aspects do not only involve the teacher, but there is also a technical
component that must be undertaken by staff that sometimes do not present an edu-
cation profile. More specifically, three different roles can be identified in the
process of design and development of activities considered in this work.
On first place, teacher is responsible for designing the activity that will be dep-
loyed using CAFCLA. Some of the task that teachers carry out includes defining
which students participate in the activity, what kind of activity is carried out,
which collaborations between students are allowed, which areas and objects of in-
terest are described in the activity, which are the objectives of the activity and
which is the data that the system will store to be provided during the activity.
Then, developer makes use of all the tools provided by CAFCLA (analysis and
design, programming, etc.) to develop the application that students will use,
according to the activity designed by teachers. Finally, technician is responsible
for deploying the technology infrastructure needed to carry out the activity
developed using CAFCLA, following the premises and recommendations set by
the framework.
Moreover, student is the participant who finally conducts the activity designed
by the teacher. They can access the resources offered by the application through
different devices selected for that purpose. In addition, they are able to collaborate