Collaborative Learning in Higher Education Processes Mediated by Internet

Introduction. The study of collaborative learning mediated by the Internet became popular in the 1990s when the use of technological mediations, supported by the Internet, showed that learning could be possible by collaborating with the computer's mediation. Later developments reviewed how technologies favored learning processes and how collaboration could be incorporated into virtual mode education. Objective. To establish unexplored study lines that can contribute to further works on collaborative learning in higher education processes mediated through the Internet. Analysis. It was conducted on 225 documents published in journals indexed in SCOPUS between 1995 and 2018. The use of the bibliometrix package in the R environment help to analyze the behavior of the publications in the indicated time frame, the areas of knowledge in which more is published about the topic, the most relevant documents due to their number of citations, and the thematic emphasis assumed in the studies analyzed; the analysis was carried out through networks of co-occurrence of key terms defined by the authors. Results. The results reflect dispersion in the research on the subject, presumably due to the tendency to develop isolated studies by disciplines, mostly oriented to analyzing the effectiveness of technological tools and environments to favor learning, on individual results but not group ones. Conclusions. Collaborative learning mediated through the Internet requires to be studied in interdisciplinary studies. It also needs to be structured, designed, and taught in higher education programs since technological tools are the support of the collaborative learning process, not the end of the educational process.