Personalized e-learning through environment design and collaborative activities

Over the last century, many theoretical frameworks and technological solutions for personalized e-learning have emerged. The underlying models, however, are often based on the practice that domain experts develop an adaptation strategy to personalize content or parts of a learning platform, which leads to different problematic aspects decreasing the feasibility or utility of such approaches. After giving a brief overview of the historical development and basic concepts of personalized e-learning, we outline the shortcomings of the traditional ‘top-down, ex ante’ models and present an alternative approach which deals with personal learning environments, web application mashups, learning activities and learner interactions, as well as pattern-based best practice sharing. Furthermore, a prototypic implementation for our ‘learner-driven, bottom-up’ approach to personalized e-learning, namely the ‘Mash-UP Personal Learning Environment’ (MUPPLE), is presented and discussed on the basis of a concrete scenario