Unibook^SE: An innovative environment for life-long learning

Abstract

This paper focuses on the application of social networking technologies -in particular Web 2.0 -in fulfilling the needs for senior citizens' education, information provision and communication. Unibook is a flexible platform which has been recently designed and implemented to provide synchronous and asynchronous learning in a university environment, which has been customized in its "SE" version to cover the aforementioned needs. Unibook SE provides online communication, including attendance of multimedia courses from different terminals (PCs, mobile phones, PDAs) with advanced features, to facilitate senior users. In this paper, the technical characteristics of Unibook SE are presented. Furthermore, the technological and operational innovations are analyzed, as well as potential extensions and improvements.