Build your Responsive Open Learning Environment

The European research project ROLE (Responsive Open Learning Environments) is aiming at empowering learners for self-regulated learning within a personalised learning environment. Towards this goal, ROLE has developed a number of learning technologies, addressing a variety of learning requirements. The purpose of this roundtable is to discuss the applications of these technologies in different learning contexts, as well as the challenges associated with enabling and supporting self-regulated learning

Collaborative Authoring of Open Courseware with SlideWiki: A Case Study in Open Education

Producing or finding and reusing high-quality educational content online can be a laborious and costly process. With the open-source and open-access SlideWiki platform, the effort of producing and reusing highly-structured remixable educational content can be crowdsourced and therefore widely shared. SlideWiki employs crowdsourcing methods in order to support the open education community in authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing open courseware. This paper presents a case study of this platform carried out in the context of open education and informal learning and reports on the feedback received thus far from members of the open education community

Responsive Open Learning Environments at the Open University

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) offer new opportunities for supporting personalized and self regulated learning both in formal and in informal education. The Open University in the UK is an early adopter of PLEs through a number of different initiatives, one of which is the European project ROLE (Responsive Open Learning Environments). This paper presents some of the lessons learned and best practices from the introduction of ROLE technologies within an informal learning test-bed at the Open University

Building an interactive simulator on a cloud computing platform to enhance students' understanding of computer systems

Cloud computing technologies have been widely adopted to improve the competitiveness and efficiency of core operations in many enterprises through additional computational resources and/or storage as provided on the underlying cloud platforms. Yet there are relatively few studies on how cloud computing may enhance students' understanding of a specific subject in e-learning systems. In a research project awarded by the Microsoft Research Asia, we successfully developed an interactive simulator aimed to enhance the students' understanding of essential concepts related to computer systems through live animations on a cloud computing platform. Essentially, we propose to integrate the latest technologies of cloud computing and learning objects into an efficient, flexible and interactive simulator to deliver powerful computing services for dynamic simulations of various computer systems specified as 'reactive' models of learning objects on the cloud storage. More importantly, through adopting the IEEE learning object metadata standard to represent each key concept/component in different computer systems, our proposed simulator can readily facilitate the sharing and reuse of relevant concepts for future e-learning applications. The system design and prototype implementation of our cloud-based interactive simulator is carefully considered with a thorough evaluation plan to investigate on how learners may benefit from our interactive simulator in various ways. And there are many directions for future extensions. © 2013 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Co-authorship in the age of cyberculture: Open Educational Resources at the Open University of the United Kingdom

Locating Open Educational Resources (OER) as a phenomenon of cyberculture, this paper presents a reflection on the possibilities of co-authorship that are entailed in OER initiatives of different natures and settings within a large organisation. A selection of OER-related projects and activities carried out at the Open University of United Kingdom (UKOU) are examined from the perspective of a comparative framework proposed by Okada (2010). The framework identifies key features and differences between ‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Education, that is, respectively, formal education, which takes place within the constraints of institutional Virtual Learning Environments, and informal education, which is gradually taking place more widely in cyberspace. The paper is introduced with a succinct discussion of the connection between cyberculture and the emergence of OER, followed by a presentation of the comparative framework adopted. The UKOU´s structure and methods are then presented, and various projects are discussed. The article concludes by proposing a brief commentary on the creative potential that is being unleashed at the very boundaries between formal and informal educational spaces that cyberculture is challenging

Learning design Rashomon II: exploring one lesson through multiple tools

International audienceAn increasing number of tools are available to support the learning design process at different levels and from different perspectives. However, this variety can make it difficult for researchers and teachers to assess the tool that is best suited to their objectives and contexts as learning designers. Several of the tools are presented elsewhere in this issue. In this article, the aforementioned tools are used as lenses to view the same learning design narrative - an inquiry-based learning lesson on healthy eating aimed at secondary-school students - from different perspectives, in a manner inspired by the plot structure of Kurosawa's film "Rashomon". In modelling the lesson on five tools, we uncovered similarities and differences in relation to the challenges posed by modelling a particular learning scenario, the ease of implementation of the computer-interpretable products' output by the tools and their different target audiences and pedagogical specialities. This comparative analysis thus illustrates some of the current underlying issues and challenges in the field of Learning Design

Thinking outside the box – A vision of ambient learning displays

Börner, D., Kalz, M., & Specht, M. (2011). Thinking outside the box – A vision of ambient learning displays. International Journal Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(6), 627–642.With a focus on the situated support of informal and non-formal learning scenarios in ubiquitous learning environments the presented paper outlines the authors’ vision of ambient learning displays - enabling learners to view, access, and interact with contextualised digital content presented in an ambient way. The vision is based on a detailed exploration of the characteristics of ubiquitous learning and a deduction of informational, interactional, and instructional aspects to focus on. Towards the vision essential research questions and objectives as well as a conceptual framework that acquires, channels, and delivers the information framed in the learning process are presented. To deliver scientific insights into the authentic learning support in informal and non-formal learning situations and to provide suggestions for the future design of ambient systems for learning the paper concludes with a research agenda proposing a research project including a discussion of related issues and challenges

Mobile Personal Learning environments and how they are applied in a Software Engineering subject

[ES] La emergencia en los últimos años de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación ha influido en los procesos y metodologías de muchas áreas. Una de ellas es la enseñanza/aprendizaje. Como principal representante de ese cambio están las plataformas de aprendizaje. Estos entornos, a pesar de satisfacer a las instituciones, no cubren con las necesidades de los discentes. Eso supone la necesidad de un nuevo concepto de entorno de aprendizaje, que se define como entorno personalizado de aprendizaje y que está centrado en el estudiante y considera su aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida. Dichos contextos, institucional y personal, deben coexistir y para no dejar de lado tecnologías cada vez más asentadas como los dispositivos móviles. En este trabajo se propone la aplicación de un entorno personalizado de aprendizaje móvil en la enseñanza de Ingeniería del Software. Dicho entorno se ha definido a partir de un framework de servicios y se ha probado con alumnos y profesores de dicha asignatura. Al final ha sido posible concluir que los entornos personalizados móviles pueden ayudar a mejorar el aprendizaje del alumno.[EN] The emergence of Information and Communication Technologies has affected processes and methodologies of different areas. One of them has been teaching and learning. The main representative of this change is the learning management systems. These environments, while meeting institutions’ needs, do not satisfy learners’ necessities. A new concept of learning environment should be defined, this is the personal learning environments. They consider the learners as the focus of the teaching and learning process and support their lifelong learning. Both the institutional and the personal context should coexist and they should not leave out new technological trends such as the mobile devices. Along this work the application of a mobile personal learning environment to a Software Engineering subject is described. This learning environment has been based on a service-based framework and has been tested with students and teachers of that subject. Finally it is possible to conclude that the mobile personal learning environments may help to improve students’ learning

Exploring Software Engineering Subjects by Using Visual Learning Analytics Techniques

[EN]The application of the Information and Communication Technologies to teaching and learning processes is linked to the development of new tools and services that can help students and teachers. Learning platforms are a clear example of this. They are very popular tools in eLearning contexts and provide different kinds of learning applications and services. In addition, these environments also register most of the interactions between the learning process stakeholders and the system. This information could potentially be used to make decisions but usually it is stored as raw data, which is very difficult to understand. This work presents a system that employs visual learning analytic techniques to facilitate the exploitation of that information. The system presented includes several tools that make possible to explore issues such as: when interaction is carried out, which contents are the most important for users, how they interact with others, etc. The system was tested in the context of a software engineering subject, taking into account the stored logs of five academic years. From this analysis it is possible to see how visual analytics can help decision-making and in this context how it helps to improve educational processes