ASCOLLA intends to expand upon prior work in order to:

• Explicitly represent group-oriented didactic approaches and introduce them into adaptive learning spaces as an additional way of encapsulating adaptation strategies and driving adaptive behaviour.
• Devise methods and techniques for identifying and representing the social-, learning-, and activity- oriented aspects of group contexts, and use them to support groups of learners.
• Achieve higher rates of spontaneous, ad-hoc interactions between on-line learners with little or no prior social contact. This will consist in providing opportunities for such interactions through the use of adaptive social awareness techniques, and in providing motivation for engaging in them.
• Investigate new approaches to providing in-course opportunities for short-lived, structured collaboration between participants. Work in this direction will seek to attain an easy to employ framework for creating and organizing brief tasks that require the participation of multiple learners, and can easily be introduced in the course of computer-supported teaching.
• Enable learners to manually and automatically populate their personal learning histories, as well as share them with their peers, investigate how this affects social cohesion, and whether and how this could be used for further improvements of collaborative learning activities.

To achieve these objectives, ASCOLLA will build upon the state of the art in the areas of: user-adaptive systems in general and adaptive e-learning systems in particular; community-based adaptation methods (such as collaborative filtering); computer-supported collaborative work, and, more specifically, computer-supported collaborative learning; social software; etc.