Let us learn together!: Do complementary abilities foster pair collaboration in web-based learning?

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are playing an increasing role in our daily lives and it is changing knowledge delivering. For engineers and related careers, where new trends and technologies are delivery continuously, having professional success depends on being updated with them. By adopting web-based learning so that both, students and professionals may accelerate such achievement. Nevertheless, the dropout rate of courses delivered by the World Wide Web (Web) used to be very high, mainly for the ones delivered by MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses). The reasons for that rely on several causes, mostly the ones related to the difficulty of students adapting themselves to the routine of individual studies. Therefore, finding strategies to deal with this difficulty may mitigate dropout rate in web-based learning. In this paper, we describe a systematic review of the literature to find evidences for the relevance of proposing a model to support web-based courses and foster collaboration between pairs as a mean to address the top three problems identified as reasons for the high dropout in distance learning. We also sketch iMPaCTS, the resulting model.