Research on online collaborative learning has explored various methods of collaborative improvement. Recently, learning analytics have been increasingly adopted for ascertaining learners' states and promoting collaborative performance. However, little effort has been made to investigate the transformation of collaborative states or to consider cognitive load as an essential factor for collaborative intervention. By bridging collaborative cognitive load theory and system dynamics modeling methods, this paper revealed the transformation of online learners' collaborative states through data analysis, and then proposed an optimized mechanism to ameliorate online collaboration. A quasi-experiment was conducted with 91 college students to examine the potential of the optimized mechanism in collaborative state transformation, awareness of collaboration, learning achievement, and cognitive load. The promising results demonstrated that students learning with the optimized mechanism performed significantly differently in collaboration and knowledge acquisition, and no additional burden in cognitive load was noted.
Keywords: cognitive load; online collaborative learning; optimized mechanism; system dynamics modeling.