Alexander Kiy

An Adaptive Personal Learning Environment Architecture

Institutions are facing the challenge to integrate legacy systems with steadily growing new ones, using different technologies and interaction patterns. With the demand of offering the best potential of all systems, several not matching systems including their functions have to be aggregated and offered in a useable way. This paper presents an adaptive, generalizable and self-organized Personal Learning Environment (PLE) framework with the potential to integrate several heterogeneous services using a service-oriented architecture. First, a general overview over the field is given, followed by the description of the core components of the PLE framework. A prototypical implementation is presented. Finally, its shown how the PLE framework can be dynamically adapted to a changing system environment, reflecting experiences from first user studies.

A Hybrid and Modular Framework for Mobile Campus Applications

Abstract Mobile devices and associated applications (apps) are an indispensable part of daily life and provide access to important information anytime and anywhere. However, the availability of university-wide services in the mobile sector is still poor. If they exist they usually result from individual activities of students and teachers. Mobile applications can have an essential impact on the improvement of students’ self-organization as well as on the design and enhancement of specific learning scenarios, though. This article introduces a mobile campus app framework, which integrates central campus services and decentralized learning applications. An analysis of strengths and weaknesses of different approaches is presented to summarize and evaluate them in terms of requirements, development, maintenance and operation. The article discusses the underlying service-oriented architecture that allows transferring the campus app to other universities or institutions at reasonable cost. It concludes with a presentation of the results as well as ongoing discussions and future work.

Technical Approaches for Personal Learning Environments: Identifying Archetypes from a Literature Review

The term Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is associated with the desire to put the learner in control of his own learning process, so that he is able to set and accomplish the desired learning goals at the right time with the learning environment chosen by him. Gradually, such a learning environment includes several digital content, services and tools. It is thus summarized as the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Even though the construction of an individual PLE is a complex task, several approaches to support this process already exist. They mostly occur under the umbrella term PLE or with little accentuations like iPLE, which especially live within the context of institutions. This paper sums up the variety of attempts and technical approaches to establish a PLE and suggests a categorization for them.

Mobile Unterstützung im Studienalltag zwischen Generalität und Individualität

Mobile Endgerate und Applikationen (Apps) sind dank vielfaltiger Kommunikations-, Informations- und Assistenzfunktionen zu einem unverzichtbaren Bestandteil unseres taglichen Lebens geworden. Inzwischen hat sich insbesondere im Hochschulumfeld eine bunte Vielfalt an mobilen Unterstutzungsangeboten etabliert, beginnend bei zentral angebotenen Uni-Apps bis hin zu unterschiedlichen Apps zur Ausgestaltung einzelner Lehrveranstaltungen oder individueller Lehr- und Lernszenarien. Angesichts der grosen Aufwande zur Entwicklung, Distribution und Pflege mobiler Anwendungen ist ein Einsatz fur eine moglichst grose Zielgruppe wunschenswert. Dies kann jedoch mit dem Charakter mobiler Endgerate als personliche, individualisierte Assistenten kollidieren.