# Mass Collaboration and Learning: Opportunities, Challenges, and Influential Factors
## 4 Analysis of Affecting Factors
### Supportive Tools and Technologies Used in Mass Collaboration and Learning
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{|p{113.8 pt}|p{113.8 pt}|} \hline
**Phases** & **Descriptions** \\ \hline Communication & The entire project-based collaborative effort takes place in the context of communication. Majority of collaborative software are equipped to make easy communication among participants. \\ \hline Team Definition and Participants & In this phase, tools enable members to find key players in the community and manage their participations in different tasks. \\ \hline Project Management & Logistical aspects of planning, scheduling, workflow, and task management are handled by tools in this phase. \\ \hline Resource Management & Common issues such as accessing to a shared storage space for project files, and keeping up with multiple versions of the same document are addressed by tools in this phase. \\ \hline Co-Creation and Ideation & Both direct interaction among members and building or editing project artifacts are facilitated by tools in this phase. \\ \hline Consensus Building & The proposed solutions by community members are refined through consensus-building tools. \\ \hline Presentation and Archiving & The presented outcomes to instructors, clients, or public are facilitated by tools in this phase. \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 9: Some partial descriptions for proposed phases in Project-Based Collaborative Learning Model [86]. Among the collected papers, 35 address the technological support for collaboration and learning. Communication and resource management phases attracted the most attention (31.40% and 28.52% respectively), whereas both consensus building phase and presentation and archiving phase are equally the lowest used (2.85%). Besides, 11.40% of the applied tools belong to both Team Definition & Participants phase and Project Management phase. Among all suggested tools, Wiki was the most applied (22.99%) which belongs to Co-Creation & Ideation phase. Figure 5 gives more details about the type and percentage of applied tools in the collected papers. Furthermore, examples of adopted tools and corresponding references are addressed in Table 10.  
From the performed analysis it can also be concluded that:  
* Resource management tools can provide professional opportunities for mass users to access, evaluate, use and share their resources properly. * Apparently, some suggested tools (e.g., Routing, Milestones, and Calendaring) are not as much used in mass collaborative projects as Wiki, Discussion board, and Blogs. There are some issues in this context that have not been adequately covered, including:
* How can a group promote adoption and develop competence in designing technology-mediated mass collaborative projects? * How can a massive load of textual material be effectively processed by intelligent tools? * How can issues such as, privacy and security arising from introducing new tools be dealt with? * How needed information or training be provided for those in the community who do not have enough technical information?