Implementation and design of a service-based framework to integrate personal and institutional learning environments

The landscape of teaching and learning has changed in recent years because of the application of Information and Communications technology. Among the most representative innovations in this regard are Learning Management Systems. Despite of their popularity in institutional contexts and the wide set of tools and services that they provide to learners and teachers, they present several issues. Learning Management Systems are linked to an institution and a period of time, and are not adapted to learners' needs. In order to address these problems Personal Learning Environments are defined, but it is clear that these will not replace Learning Management Systems and other institutional contexts. Both types of environment should therefore coexist and interact. This paper presents a service-based framework to facilitate such interoperability. It supports the export of functionalities from the institutional to the personal environment and also the integration within the institution of learning outcomes from personal activities. In order to achieve this in a flexible, extensible and open way, web services and interoperability specifications are used. In addition some interoperability scenarios are posed. The framework has been tested in real learning contexts and the results show that interoperability is possible, and that it benefits learners, teachers and institutions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments

Wild, F., Kalz, M., & Palmér, M. (Eds.) (2008). Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE08). September, 17, 2008, Maastricht, The Netherlands: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073. Available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-388.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project (funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org]) and partly sponsored by the LTfLL project (funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme, priority ISCT. Contract 212578 [http://www.ltfll-project.org

A Predictor for PLE Management: Impacts of Self-Regulated Online Learning on Student\u27s Learning Skills

Web 2.0 integration requires a high level of learner-centered skills to create a personal learning environment (PLE). The pedagogical capability of Web 2.0 could support and promote self-regulated learning (SRL) by enabling the constructions of PLEs. This study investigated how will each of the six aspects of self-regulated online learning (i.e., environment structuring, goal setting, time management, task strategies, help seeking, & self-evaluation) respectively predict the level of initiative, the sense of control, and the level of self-reflection in personal learning environment (PLE) management. The study concluded that all six aspects of SRL could predict three types of PLE management besides environmental structuring to the level of initiative. Educators need to prepare all learners to advance their SRL to achieve sufficient PLE skills and knowledge to become competent digital network learners

A Predictor for PLE Management: Impacts of Self- Regulated Online Learning on Students’ Learning Skills

Web 2.0 integration requires a high level of learner-centered skills to create a personal learning environment (PLE). The pedagogical capability of Web 2.0 could support and promote self-regulated learning (SRL) by enabling the constructions of PLEs. This study investigated how will each of the six aspects of self-regulated online learning (i.e., environment structuring, goal setting, time management, task strategies, help seeking, & self-evaluation) respectively predict the level of initiative, the sense of control, and the level of self-reflection in personal learning environment (PLE) management. The study concluded that all six aspects of SRL could predict three types of PLE management besides environmental structuring to the level of initiative. Educators need to prepare all learners to advance their SRL to achieve sufficient PLE skills and knowledge to become competent digital network learners

A case study for measuring informal learning in PLEs

The technological support for learning and teaching processes is constantly changing. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) applied to education, cause changes that affect the way in which people learn. This application introduces new software systems and solutions to carry out teaching and learning activities. Connected to ICT application, the emergence of Web 2.0 and its use in learning contexts enables an online implementation of the student-centred learning paradigm. In addition, 2.0 trends provide “new” ways to exchange, making easier for informal learning to become patent. Given this context, open and user-centered learning environments are needed to integrate such kinds of tools and trends and are commonly described as Personal Learning Environments. Such environments coexist with the institutional learning management systems and they should interact and exchange information between them. This interaction would allow the assessment of what happens in the personal environment from the institutional side. This article describes a solution to make the interoperability possible between these systems. It is based on a set of interoperability scenarios and some components and communication channels. In order to test the solution it is implemented as a proof of concept and the scenarios are validated through several pilot experiences. In this article one of such scenarios and its evaluation experiment is described to conclude that functionalities from the institutional environments and the personal ones can be combined and it is possible to assess what happens in the activities based on them.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Interoperability in eLearning Contexts. Interaction between LMS and PLE

The emergence of the Information and Communication Technologies and its application in several areas with varying success, implies the definition of a great number of software systems. Such systems are implemented in very different programming languages, using distinct types of resources, etc. Learning and Teaching is one of those application areas, where there are different learning platforms, repositories, tools, types of content, etc. These systems should interoperate among them to provide better and more useful learning services to students and teachers, and to do so web services and interoperability specifications are needed. This paper presents a service-based framework approach to facilitate the interoperability between Learning Management Systems and Personal Learning Environments, which has been implemented as a proof of concept and evaluated through several pilot experiences. From such experiences it is possible to see that interoperability among the personal and institutional environments it is possible and, in this way, learners can learn independently without accessing to the institutional site and teachers have information about learning that happens in informal activities

Integrating open services for building educational environments

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.I. D. Carlos, R. Cobos, E. Guerra, J. de Lara, A. Pescador, and J. Sánchez Cuadrado, “Integrating Open Services for Building Educational Environments”, in Global Engineering Education Conference, Berlin (Germany), 2013, pp. 1147-1156The increasing popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has raised the need for highly scalable, customizable, open learning environments. At the same time, there is a growing trend to open the services that the companies offer on the web with open APIs and in the form of REST services, facilitating their integration in customized applications. The goal of this work is to show how such open services can be used for the support of on-line educational systems. These services were not created for an education context, so it is necessary to complement it with functionalities for supporting aspects such as evaluations, monitoring or collaboration. This article discusses on the strategies for integrating services for education and presents two cases studies: first, SMLearning, a collaborative learning environment supported by social media platforms Facebook and YouTube, and second, an application for project-based programming courses, customized through a generative architecture, making heavy use of Google services.This research was partly funded by the Spanish National Plan of R+D, project number TIN2011-24139; and by the Autonomous Community of Madrid, e-Madrid project, number S2009/TIC-1650

Enhancing User-Service Interaction Through a Global User-Centric Approach to SOA

Considered as enablers of seamless application-to- application integration both within company boundaries and on a global scale, Web Services-based SOAs have traditionally focused on automating service-to-service collaboration. However, they have never featured a "face " to human users. This gap between human users and services still prevents enterprises from realizing how innovations at the SOA front-end help to make people more productive. And, ultimately, it hinders the emergence of a real Web of Services driven by a global, user-centric SOA. In this paper, we revisit the notion of SOA and analyze its major shortcomings with regard to the emergence of a Web of Services enhancing user-service interaction and increased service usability. We then elaborate on novel, currently emerging technologies that facilitate the establishment of the global mesh of interoperable user-centric services. A novel platform architecture is presented that builds on all the key technical enablers

The Implementation, Deployment and Evaluation of a Mobile Personal Learning Environment

[EN] The application of ICT to learning, the Web 2.0 trends and the widespread use of technologies such as mobile devices make it necessary to provide new solutions to satisfy the needs of learners. Such solutions should treat the students as the centre of the learning process. The students should be able to decide which tools they will use to learn, and the learning institution must consider the behaviour of students in such personal learning activities independently of the location where learning activities are carried out. In addition, learners can choose the type of devices they will use with special attention to mobile technologies. The work described in this paper proposes a service-based approach to defining mobile personal learning environments that facilitates communication with institutional learning platforms. Such an approach is implemented as a proof-of-concept and evaluated via a pilot study to demonstrate that such types of mobile learning platforms are feasible and can increase students’motivation to help them learn

Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration and Knowledge Emergence as a Business Web Strategy Enabler

The Web is becoming in many respects a powerful tool for supporting business strategy as companies are quickly becoming more and more reliant on new Web-based technologies to capitalize on new business opportunities. However, this introduces additional managerial problems and risks that have to be taken into consideration, if they are not to be left behind. In this chapter we explore the Web’s present and future potential in relation to information sharing, knowledge management, innovation management, and the automation of cross-organizational business transactions. The suggested approach will provide entrepreneurs, managers, and IT leaders with guidance on how to adopt the latest Web 2.0-based technologies in their everyday work with a view to setting up a business Web strategy. Specifically, Enterprise 2.0 is presented as a key enabler for businesses to expand their ecosystems and partnerships. Enterprise 2.0 also acts as a catalyst for improving innovation processes and knowledge work