weSPOT: A personal and social approach to inquiry-based learning

weSPOT is a new European initiative proposing a novel approach for personal and social inquiry-based learning in secondary and higher education. weSPOT aims at enabling students to create their mash-ups out of cloud based tools and services in order to perform scientific investigations. Students will also be able to share their inquiry accomplishments in social networks and receive feedback from the learning environment and their peers. This paper presents the research framework of the weSPOT project, as well as the initial inquiry-based learning scenarios that will be piloted by the project in real-life educational settings

EU–originated MOOCs, with focus on multi- and single-institution platforms

No abstract available

Quality Assessment for E-learning: a Benchmarking Approach (Third edition)

The primary purpose of this manual is to provide a set of benchmarks, quality criteria and notes for guidance against which e-learning programmes and their support systems may be judged. The manual should therefore be seen primarily as a reference tool for the assessment or review of e-learning programmes and the systems which support them. However, the manual should also prove to be useful to staff in institutions concerned with the design, development, teaching, assessment and support of e-learning programmes. It is hoped that course developers, teachers and other stakeholders will see the manual as a useful development and/or improvement tool for incorporation in their own institutional systems of monitoring, evaluation and enhancement

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Forming Digital Workspace: Current State and Applications of Extended Reality in Virtual Teams

Extended reality (XR) has been widely applied as an umbrella term encompassing virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Despite extensive research on XR applications in various contexts, little attention has been drawn to its utilization in work scenarios, particularly in virtual teams. This study is a systematic literature review of virtual teams utilizing XR in the digital workspace, incorporating related articles from four scientific databases over the past decade. The review focuses on two aspects: the current state of XR implementation in virtual teams and how technology addresses the digital collaborative process. Findings highlight team types, application areas, collaboration modes, and key actions associated with XR usage. A theoretical gap is revealed, as previous studies focus on either the technological aspects of XR or its outcomes. Additionally, this study proposes a model to illustrate how XR technologies empower virtual teams, providing valuable insight for organizations regarding its potential usage

A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR MOBILE GROUP SUPPORT SYSTEMS

The rapid development of wireless communication and mobile devices has created a great opportunity to support mobile group coordination at a more efficient level than before. This article presents a framework for Mobile Group Support Systems (MGSS) that considers four dimensions: supporting whom, supporting what, where to support and how to support. A good MGSS design should take consideration with the characteristics of each dimension: the system should be able to support mobile users working jointly with members from multiple parties; using available and advanced mobile technology, the system should be able to support context freedom, context dependent, and ad hoc coordination under dynamic, uncertain, frequent disrupting, time and space stretched and fluid context. To meet these requirements, we discuss the issues related to three basic functions of MGSS: mobile communication, group coordination, and context awareness