Bridging the gap between PLE and LMS

Bridging the gap between PLE and LMS

Francesco Di CerboFrancesco Di Cerbo, Gabriella Dodero,

Teresa Liew Bao Yng°

Center for Applied Software Engineering

Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy

{name.surname}@unibz.it

°[email protected]

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

mailto:[email protected]

July 6, 2011 Bridging the gap between PLE and LMS 2

Overview

The paper illustrates how to combine the LMS and PLE worlds, making use of Web 2.0 and 3D Web technologies.

This synthesis is created using DIEL, a collaborative environment powered by Web 2.0; based on widely used technology, Moodle.


“Industrial Age” Education

“Traditional” teaching processes are generally content-based. Same contents for everyone, and at

the same pace. Many research efforts innovate “industrial

age” approaches, to become (more) learner-centered.


LMS

Learning Management Systems have been around since many years.

While their contribution is being questioned by a number of researchers, their historical value in easing the interactions between educational institutions and students stands.

Why are they criticized?


LMS

LMS are generally more focused on supporting structured (compartmented) teaching activities, rather than emphasizing on individual needs.

To date many institutional e-learning sites and systems lack of user-centered approach, social interaction and collaboration.

Despite a 5% increment of students that attended at least one online course from 2007 to 2010, their LMS user satisfaction drops from 77% to 51%. (ECAR 2010).


The Walled Garden Effect

It is the creation of a specific (and isolated) environment, where materials and interactions take place on a specific topic or subject.

Authors and bloggers on education often underline the walled garden as one of the major issues connected with institutional LMS.

An isolated system is valuable for keeping authoritative information and focusing its community, but it does not foster social collaboration in the large scale.


Nice Walled Gardens...


Nice Walled Gardens...


Walled Garden as Drawback

Knowledge splitting inside LMS does not help students in making logical connections between different topics.

It does not help to establish inter-community interactions, as well!

Many researchers point out the role of social media (Facebook, Twitter and so on) in supporting students' interactions for educational purposes, such as finding resources and explanations (B. Smith 2009).


Instead, with PLE...

From Weller, M.: The ed techie: My personal work/leisure/learning environment. Online.


PLE

Personal Learning Environments (PLE) are websites or services where learners are able to produce learning content and considerations through: storing documentation aggregating data from external

communities (RSS and blogs)

PLEs are the combination of social software applications and web services in a platform or portal, for the purpose of learning.


An User-Centered Environment

A PLE : is user-centric per design is devoted to mash-ups can be used as a portfolio of

knowledge and resources is valuable as Life-Long Learning

support tool, independent from any institution or experience.

On the other hand, it is not well-suited as support for structured interactions, like for instance assignment management.


Our idea

Considering the advantages of both systems, we tried to combine them in a single product.

We designed a specific support for PLE interactions, that is embedded in a LMS 3D system, DIEL.

3D is the integration key we adopted, to exploit spatial organization of contents and support for social PLE interactions.


What is DIEL?

It stays for “Dynamic Interactive E-Learning” software.

Key points: Highest flexibility for instructor's use. Possibility to implement “Learning by

Doing” approaches in a virtual collaborative environment.➔ Comprehension and co-construction of

educational contents.

Social translucence to allow immediate and intuitive virtual interactions.


DIEL PLE Vision


PLE in DIEL

A number of components take part in DIEL's PLE implementation.

Communication and Bookmarking tools are implemented and currently available.


Communications


Bookmarks


Usability Test

The usability tests involved 12 university and 12 high school students.

The collected results are encouraging, especially with respect to user satisfaction.


Upcoming: Going social...

It is planned to extend 3D PLE support, showing also shared PLE resources of other users.

➔ Valuable information on user collaboration levels in a community.


Conclusions

PLE support can be considered one promising perspective introducing learning-centered features into well-structured LMS, combining benefits of both platforms.

DIEL provides an initial support for PLE, allowing users to keep their resources and social interactions in a private and self-organized space.

As future work, we shall extend PLE, adding specific social interaction features.


References

Smith, B., “Use of Online Educational Social Networking in a School Environment” http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/handle/1840.16/900

ECAR report 2010, S. D. Smith and J. B. Caruso, “ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology, 2010,” Tech. Rep., Oct. 2010. http://www.educause.edu/


Thank you!

[email protected]

DIEL is available at:diel.case.unibz.it

Questions?


Social Translucence

Design of social infrastructures, making collective activities visible

The community adapts interactions based on knowledge of respective positions and activities


Social Translucence

Design of social infrastructures, making collective activities visible

The community adapts interactions based on knowledge of respective positions and activities