Abstract
Computer supported collaborative learning is a research area that is concerned with collaborative activities that generate learning, through the use of software for interaction between its participants. This area focuses mainly on how people can learn together with the help of computers, being one of the most promising innovations to improve teaching and learning with the help of modern information and communication technologies. In many situations, it has been believed that the availability of the technological infrastructure guarantees an effective collaboration, but for this, it is necessary to go beyond providing a set of class practices, laboratories and the respective technological tools. For there to be collaboration in the execution of an activity is necessary to learn how to do it, not everything is a matter of putting in the same place a group of people, provide them with a software tool and advise them to collaborate. This is why, it is important to define strategies to increase collaboration and it is necessary to analyze some external factors such as group of people, activities and technological infrastructure, besides taking into account the monitoring and evaluation of the learning process by the teacher, who must be in continuous attention that the collaboration is carried out. In this paper shows a project that was carried out through the monitoring of general phases of improvement of software processes, where the collaborative learning process was analyzed, finding some improvement opportunities that were applied and later validated in different case studies. Finally, a strategy was developed to increase collaboration through a set of monitoring and evaluation mechanisms of the collaborative learning process that were consolidated into a formal specification. From this research it was concluded that the definition of the different monitoring and evaluation mechanisms of the collaborative learning process is useful and helps to increase the collaboration although its application is moderately complex, for which we analyze some other strategies that can be taken into account for subsequent projects and how they can help in the increase of the collaboration in these processes.