Online Learning Support in a Ubiquitous Learning Environment

The ubiquitous learning environment (ULE) is both an ontological and epistemological problem. For most scholars, ULE provides an interoperable, pervasive, and seamless learning architecture to connect, integrate, and share three major dimensions of learning resources: learning collaborators, learning contents, and learning services. Furthermore, ULE is described as an educational paradigm that mainly uses technology for curriculum delivery. Through reflection and exploration, this chapter argues that online learning support has a symbiotic relationship with ULE because the student, at some point, should move beyond the “text” level into concepts and conceptual organization schemes (ontologies). In line with this viewpoint, this chapter problematizes the gap created by real-world and digital-world resources—and argues that online learning support for teaching and learning processes have not yet emulated ULE as an important pedagogical resource.Institute for Open and Distance Learning (IODL