Monitoring Collaboration in Virtual Environments for Learning

In Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) for learning, automatic analyses to facilitate the students’ collaboration demands to understand and assess interaction in a computational mode. Here, the graphical representation of the user, an avatar, offers visual feedback allowing interactants to reply with actions or gestures, thus this monitoring task must include their nonverbal communication. This book presents a proposal for the interpretation of the users’ avatars nonverbal interaction with the aim to conduct automatic analyses intended to facilitate collaboration in small groups in CVE for learning. Empirical studies conducted to understand and evaluate elements of the model are also discussed among with an application in which it was implemented for a virtual tutor. The insights on the users’ nonverbal behavior within computer scenarios might help those interested on mixing them for collaborative interaction analyses with other approaches such as those based on dialogue. Although the approach was defined for collaborative learning, adaptations can be made to monitor other group activities in VEs like those for training or virtual meetings.