Group Behaviors and Team Roles Identification in Collaborative E-learning

The behavior of students that belong to small collaborative groups in e-learning environments is key for the success of learning experiences. For this reason, in this article, a research to discover the characteristics of that behavior is presented. This characterization was made through a double content analysis over an interaction set generated by advanced students of Computer Science when working in a collaborative forum. The content analysis was made by specialists who first coded the interactions considering group behaviors and then group roles. The results showed that: there are some dominant group behaviors, mental roles are more frequent than social and action roles, and there is a relationship among group roles and group behaviors.