Moodle plugin to promote students’ interactions for vygotskian computer-based learning activities

Computer-based educational environments aimed at promoting collaborative learning need to be properly designed and structured to be effective. For this reason, it is necessary to rely on educational activities implemented through computer-based collaborative scripts aimed at being internalized by students promoting peer interaction. In this regard, we named Vygotskian Computer Based Learning Activities (VCBLAs) educational activities designed through collaborative computer-based scripts, to promote students’ mathematical skills. A VCBLA is implemented on Moodle and it includes a narrative flow and collaboration tools. However, Moodle presents some limitations that we are attempting to overcome, developing a plugin prototype to implement a user-friendly interface for VCBLAs. The prototype allows the user to visualize, in a single browser window, a dashboard which includes both the course contents and the chats which are available depending on the roles and actions assigned to users within the collaborative script. In this paper, we first outline the features of collaborative learning and collaborative scripts, then we discuss the characteristics of a VCBLA, and, finally, we show some design and implementation details of the Moodle plugin prototype.