Jukka Purma

Information Architecture and Design Solutions Scaffolding Authoring of Open Educational Resources

This paper presents the open learning object repository and collaborative authoring platform LeMill (http://lemill.net), which has over 7,500 members and over 8,500 reusable learning resources (situation in October 30th, 2009), all created by the community members. The design of LeMill has tackled numerous challenges that hinder the authoring and sharing of educational resources by communities of teachers. This paper describes the research-based design process that was used to solve these challenges. The information architecture of LeMill scaffolds authors toward collaboration and sharing. The licensing scheme encourages reusing and remixing of educational content. In order to make LeMill easy to learn and use we have avoided technical terminology and complicated metadata forms in the user interface. As an open community we have also tackled multicultural and multilingual issues. In this paper, we present the information architecture and design of LeMill, including the technical solutions. We believe that our design solutions will contribute to the goal of creating an open educational resource ecosystem.

Scaling Informal Learning at the Workplace: A Model and Four Designs from a Large-Scale Design-Based Research Effort.

Workplace learning happens in the process and context of work, is multi-episodic, often informal, problem based and takes place on a just-in-time basis. While this is a very effective means of delivery, it also does not scale very well beyond the immediate context. We review three types of technologies that have been suggested to scale learning and three connected theoretical discourses around learning and its support. Based on these three strands and an in-depth contextual inquiry into two workplace learning domains, health care and building and construction, four design-based research projects were conducted that have given rise to designs for scaling informal learning with technology. The insights gained from the design and contextual inquiry contributed to a model that provides an integrative view on three informal learning processes at work and how they can be supported with technology: (1) task performance, reflection and sensemaking; (2) help seeking, guidance and support; and (3) emergence and maturing of collective knowledge. The model fosters our understanding of how informal learning can be scaled and how an orchestrated set of technologies can support this process.

Scaling Informal Learning: An Integrative Systems View on Scaffolding at the Workplace

While several technological advances have been suggested to scale learning at the workplace, none has been successful to scale informal learning. We review three theoretical discourses and suggest an integrated systems model of scaffolding informal workplace learning that has been created to tackle this challenge. We derive research questions that emerge from this model and illustrate these with an in-depth analysis of two workplace learning domains.

Creating and Sharing Knowledge Through Experiences: A Case Study with Ach so! in Healthcare Education

This paper reports results from a case study that investigated creating and sharing knowledge arising from experiences with the Ach so! mobile app for video annotation in healthcare education. The qualitative content analysis of the interview data indicated that Ach so! enhanced reflection when the students saw their action from videos and thus were able to evaluate their own and group performance as external observers and to create knowledge on their experiences. Ach so! promoted knowledge sharing when the students together reflected their performance and annotated successful and failed incidents. Research outcomes contributed to the design of the Ach so! and workplace practices, and suggested applying Ach so! to dynamic learning contexts and scaling the applicability of Ach so! to informal and non-formal learning contexts at workplaces.

A Community Information System for Ubiquitous Informal Learning Support

There are many mobile apps supporting informal learning tasks like sense-making out of multimedia materials. However, regardless how well these have been implemented, their scope and scalability is limited either by over-specialization and consequently limited transferability or by over-generalization - with a lack of informal learning support for most Web 2.0 apps. Our cloud-based mobile Web information system approach is theoretically founded and designed for scalability in informal learning. As a proof of concept we present a semantic video annotation scenario for supporting informal learning at workplace. As the approach has been designed for community learning analytics, we can present results from a preliminary evaluation. We conducted our research with a strong commitment towards open source software development, so that our solutions are already available and can have impact beyond the usual scope of a funded project.