Challenges in the Development of Affective Collaborative Learning Environment with Artificial Peers

Collaborative learning is a process that involves a group of peers collaborating with the aim to acquire new knowledge or skills. Collaborative learning environment enables such interactions by means of ICT. The paper focuses on affective collaborative learning environments, i.e., collaborative learning environments that are additionally aware of user’s emotions and moods. Based on the analysis of existing research, a general architecture of an affective collaborative learning environment has been proposed in the paper and the main challenges for developing such an environment have been identified, namely, nonintrusive and safe detection of user’s emotions, the adaptation of tutoring strategies, as well as modelling of artificial peers. This study can be considered the first step for the development of the collaborative learning environment that takes into account various affective aspects during the collaborative learning process.