Towards Responsive Open Learning Environments: The ROLE Interoperability Framework

Abstract

In recent years, research on mash-up technologies for learning environments has gained interest. The overall goal is to enrich or replace traditional learning management systems (LMS) with mash-ups of widgets and services that can be easily combined and configured to fit the learner needs. This paper presents the implemented prototype of the ROLE interoperability framework and a business and an educational case study. The framework provides a common technical infrastructure to assemble widgets and services in Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Evaluation results indicate that the perceived usefulness and usability is high for one case study in which a mature LMS was enriched with ROLE technology. In the second case study, an early mash-up prototype was deployed. The usefulness and usability of this early prototype were rated low, but the case study provides interesting insights for further research and development.

Lessons Learned from the Development of the ROLE PLE Framework

“…These components provide the basis for real-time communication between widgets and users and automatic user activity tracking from tools and services. To evaluate the usability and usefulness of the ROLE philosophy and the ROLE framework, we have integrated the ROLE framework in various platforms, such as Moodle, CLIX (Govaerts et al 2011;Rensing et al 2013), Graasp and the ROLE SDK. These platforms have been used in various real-world evaluation settings (Govaerts et al 2011), which have been documented in Chaps.…”

Smart Ambient Learning with Physical Artifacts UsingWearable Technologies

“…The logging client has to be entered as administrator on the server. On the frontend, we developed multiple OpenSocial widgets that run within the ROLE SDK [36]. Initial queries like finding the specific server to analyze can be entered in the Selector Gadget.…”

Towards Portable Learning Analytics Dashboards

“…Originally OpenSocial was focused on social network applications, but thanks to educational interest in social media, OpenSocial became more popular in technology enhanced learning (TEL). Notable TEL examples include Graasp 14 , Sciverse 15 and ROLE [21].…”

“…Such LA dashboards assembled with OpenSocial widgets can run on 16 http://shindig.apache.org/ any platform that implements the OpenSocial and ActivityStreams specifications. To ease distribution and search of LA dashboards and widgets Graasp has integrated the ROLE Widget Store [21] as a widget repository.…”