Ilona Buchem

Gamification designs in Wearable Enhanced Learning for healthy ageing

Supporting healthy ageing through sustained physical fitness requires interventions that promote healthy levels of physical activity as part of daily life. Wearable devices, such as activity trackers are body-worn and may be seamlessly integrated into daily activities to promote fitness. Although wearables have been used by younger adopters to optimise physical fitness, little is known so far how these emerging technologies may be leveraged to enhance learning and improve well-being and fitness of seniors. In this paper we present a novel approach to designing Wearable Enhanced Learning (WELL) for healthy ageing as part of the R&D project “Fitness MOOC - interaction of seniors with wearable fitness trackers in the MOOC (fMOOC)”. The fMOOC project is a cooperation between Beuth University of Applied Sciences and the Geriatrics Research Group at Charité Berlin and aims at enhancing healthy ageing through an embodied learning experience in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) with support of wearable activity trackers. This paper focuses on gamification designs in wearable enhanced learning for senior users and addresses the issue of user engagement.

Designing a Collaborative Learning Hub for Virtual Mobility Skills - Insights from the European Project Open Virtual Mobility

Higher education faces high requirements and challenges in today’s global world, including internationalisation as a response to globalisation. Virtual Mobility (VM) has a great potential to contribute to the internationalisation, innovation and inclusion in higher education. While it is feasible to encourage outward and inward student and faculty mobility, the main limitations include high costs of travelling and living in a foreign country, diverse socio-economic, health-related and even political issues. These barriers can be reduced by adding virtual components to mobility programs and actions (e.g. virtual seminars, virtual labs, virtual internships). This paper presents an approach for designing a collaborative learning hub for promoting VM Skills of educators and students in the European Higher Education Area. The VM Learning Hub assists to enhance the Virtual Mobility readiness of higher education institutions, educators and students through achievement, assessment and recognition of VM skills. This paper introduces the concept and the architecture of VM Learning Hub – a Collaborative and Personal Learning Environment with embedded technologies for innovative forms of skill attainment (open education, gamification), skill assessment (test-based and evidence-based e-assessment), skill recognition (open credentials, linked data) and collaboration (based on algorithm-based matching of learning groups).

Digital Badges as (Parts of) Digital Portfolios: Design Patterns for Educational and Personal Learning Practice

This chapter explores the concepts of digital badges as (parts of) digital portfolios and proposes two digital design patterns for badges-portfolio integration. Digital portfolios are dynamic collections of digital artefacts including work samples, learning resources, records of skills and accomplishments, which may be created by an individual, a group, a community or an organisation. Digital portfolios can have multiple purposes, such as demonstrating learning achievements (assessment), recording a learning process (journaling) and demonstrating skills (profiling). The different models of digital portfolio practice represent different approaches to documenting, recognising and enhancing learning. Digital badges are similar to digital portfolios in that they enable learners to document and share learning pathways, learning achievements, skills and competencies. Digital badges can be used as part of digital portfolios or as stand-alone portfolios in form of badge collections. Based on the analysis of current practice, conceptual guideline for designing digital badges as (parts of) digital portfolios are drafted following the model of reflective learning design with design narratives and design patterns as a core methodology. Design patterns propose solutions to recurrent problems in particular contexts, offering a set of principles to guide the instructional designer towards a design decision. As such design patterns are models for actual design activities. Design patterns presented in this chapter are inferred from the analysis of design narratives from three selected projects employing digital badges for learning in distinctive ways. By defining design problems and design solutions related to digital badges as (parts of) digital portfolios, this chapter integrates research-based evidence and experiential knowledge of digital learning design.