Project Description

Introduction

The project focuses on advanced, context-aware Learning Process Management (LPM) within Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) as an increasingly important new paradigm in online education. Being rooted in modern pedagogical theories, PLEs follow learner-centric approach and grant learners with the ownership and full control over their learning processes. They also foster the learners’ active involvement in the learning process. However, to fully leverage the potentials of PLEs, learners need adequate support, primarily in the form of recommendation and feedback-provision services. Accordingly, by relying upon the results of previous EU-funded projects, the project team intends to develop different kinds of services that provide learners with high-quality recommendation regarding the learning activities to be taken, the learning content to be used, and/or who can be contacted for collaboration and/or help provision. All the recommendations should be based on the learner’s current learning context and the state of online presence of members of his/her social graph (i.e., network of online connections). The project takes an innovative technological approach – it offers new ways of combining Social Web presence data and Semantic Web technologies to provide advanced support for managing online learning resources and processes within PLEs. Here, the role of Semantic Web technologies is to advance the state of the art in collaborative learning on the Social Web and to meaningfully interrelate existing and/or discover new knowledge over the learner processes (relationships, resources). In addition, a strong innovation potential of this project can be seen in the novel interactive and adaptive support for both learning resources and processes.

Project structure

The project is structured in three distinct and slightly overlapping phases (denoted as P1, P2, and P3). Each phase comprises several work-packages (WPs). The phases and the respective WPs are organized as follows:

WP0. Project management: : Aug 01, 2010 – Sep 30, 2012

  • ensure stable management and monitoring of R&D activities, finances, and administration

P1. Conceptualization

WP1. State-of the-art analysis: Aug 01, 2010 – Oct 31, 2010

  • review existing pedagogical approaches and technologies relevant to the project
  • create a good research ground for carrying out the other WPs

WP2. Pedagogical framework: Aug 01, 2010 – Oct 31, 2010

  • select the most suitable pedagogical approach for the project’s requirements
  • provide a good understanding of how learners’ awareness of online presence of their peers enriches learning experience in PLEs

WP3. ICT models: Oct 01, 2010 – Dec 31, 2010

  • develop ICT models to be used in the project
  • develop algorithms for recommendation of learning resources based on the learners’ current learning context and their expressions of online presence

P2. Implementation

WP4. Prototype development: Jan 01, 2011 – Jul 31, 2011

  • establish a PLE by integrating several tools that learners often interact with
  • test and evaluate the initial implementation (i.e., the prototype)

WP5. Full-scale development: Aug 01, 2011 – Feb 28, 2012

  • improve the prototype implementation based on the evaluation results
  • develop services for recommendation of relevant learning resources based on the learner’s present learning context and expressed online presence
  • test and evaluate the developed recommendation services

P3. Demonstration and dissemination

WP6. Demonstration: Aug 01, 2011 – Sep 30, 2012

  • inform the research community and end users of the accomplished research results
  • acquire a useful feedback to further validate the pedagogical baseline and improve the supporting services

WP7. Dissemination: Oct 01, 2010 – Sep 30, 2012

  • ensure maximum impact and sustainability of the project’s results within and outside the project consortium
  • stimulate adoption of SSW technologies to enhance LPM within real-world, primarily high-education and workplace-learning settings
  • gather feedback for the additional validation of the pedagogical assumptions and further improvement of the supporting services