Abstract
In recent years, educational practitioners and learning technologists have been designing, developing and deploying a wide range of innovative environments to enhance meaningful, seamless and exciting learning experiences. In these learning environments, students may interact as individuals or in groups across several learning spaces, while utilizing various technologies that support different contexts of use. However, despite these efforts and progress in this field, there are still a number of technical challenges associated with software architecture issues related to how to implement tools that support seamless learning. In this chapter, we describe our ongoing research related to the design, development and deployment of different software solutions to support seamless learning activities across a variety of settings. Here, we examine and propose a candidate software architecture that is inspired by our implementation of seamless learning activities. In particular, we direct our efforts towards enhancing and facilitating these activities by supporting the reuse and remixing of digital content generated by learners and teachers. The features of the proposed architecture also support the reusability and interoperability of software components and micro-services for different interactions. We address architectural challenges identified in activities we have carried out during the last five years. Three different use cases of seamless learning activities in different subject areas are analysed and the supporting technical and software solutions examined, in order to identify and extract the salient features and functional requirements of the proposed architecture. In addition, we use these cases to examine, analyse and propose new and refined ways to cope with challenges related to the activities that need to be implemented for seamless learning flow. We present and discuss our results describing an architecture capable of supporting meaningful, appealing and seamless learning experiences that are independent of subject matter, context of use and supporting technological solutions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Al-Emran, M., Elsherif, H. M., & Shaalan, K. (2016). Investigating attitudes towards the use of mobile learning in higher education. Computers in Human Behaviour, 56, 93–102.
Anderson, T., & Shattuck, J. (2012). Design-based research: A decade of progress in education research? Educational Researcher, 41(1), 16–25.
Baran, E. (2014). A review of research on mobile learning in teacher education. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 17(4), 17.
Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), 141–178.
Collins, A. (1992). Toward a design science of education. In New directions in educational technology (pp. 15–22). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
De Jong, T., van Joolingen, W. R., Giemza, A., Girault, I., Hoppe, U., Kindermann, J., … & van der Zanden, M. (2010). Learning by creating and exchanging objects: The SCY experience. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41, 909–921.
Håklev, S., Faucon, L., Hadzilacos, T., & Dillenbourg, P. (2017). Orchestration graphs: Enabling rich social pedagogical scenarios in MOOCs. In Proceedings of the Fourth (2017) ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale (pp. 261–264). ACM.
Huang, Y. M., & Chiu, P. S. (2015). The effectiveness of a meaningful learning-based evaluation model for context-aware mobile learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(2), 437–447.
King, L. J., Gardner-McCune, C., Vargas, P., & Jimenez, Y. (2014). Re-discovering and re-creating African American historical accounts through mobile apps: The role of mobile technology in history education. Journal of Social Studies Research, 38(3), 173–188.
Kohen-Vacs, D. (2016). A design and development approach for deploying web and mobile applications to support collaborative seamless learning activities. Doctoral dissertation, Linnaeus University Press.
Kohen-Vacs, D., Milrad, M., Ronen, M., & Jansen, M. (2016). Evaluation of enhanced educational experiences using interactive videos and web technologies: Pedagogical and architectural considerations. Smart Learning Environments, 3(1), 6.
Kohen-Vacs, D., Ronen, M., Ben Aharon, O., & Milrad, M. (2011). Incorporating mobile elements in collaborative pedagogical scripts. In Collaborative Pedagogical Scripts: 19th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2011) (pp. 357–364). Chiang Mai, Thailand: Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education.
Mayer, P., Schroeder, A., & Koch, N. (2008). A model-driven approach to service orchestration. In Services Computing, 2008: SCC’08, IEEE International Conference on (Vol. 2, pp. 533–536). IEEE.
Milrad, M., Wong, L. H., Sharples, M., Hwang, G. J., Looi, C. K., & Ogata, H. (2013). Seamless learing: An international perspective on next-generation technology-enhanced learning. In Z. L. Berge & L. Y. Muilenburg (Eds.), Handbook of mobile learning (pp. 95–108). New York: Routledge.
Muñoz-Cristóbal, J. A., Asensio-Pérez, J. I., Martínez-Monés, A., & Dimitriadis, Y. (2015). Orchestrating learning across spaces: Integrating heterogeneous technologies of the existing educational practice in a heterogeneous classroom ecology. In L.P. Prieto, Y. Dimitriadis, A. Harrer, M. Milrad, M. Nussbaum, & J.D. Slotta (Workshop Organizers) (Eds.), The Orchestrated Collaborative Classroom Workshop 2015 co-located with 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL 2015), Gothenburg, Sweden
Osang, F. B., Ngole, J., & Tsuma, C. (2013). Prospects and challenges of mobile learning implementation in Nigeria: Case study, National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). In International Conference on ICT for Africa (pp. 20–23).
Pea, R., Milrad, M., Maldonado, H., Vogel, B., Kurti, A., & Spikol, D. (2011). Learning and technological designs for mobile science inquiry collaboratories. In Orchestrating inquiry learning (1st ed., pp. 105–127). London, UK.
Prieto Santos, L. P., Dimitriadis, Y., Harrer, A., Milrad, M., Nussbaum, M., & Slotta, J. D. (2015). The orchestrated collaborative classroom: Designing and making sense of heterogeneous ecologies of teaching and learning resources. In Exploring the Material Conditions of Learning: The Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) Conference 2015 (Vol. 2, No. EPFL-CONF-209189, pp. 880–884). International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Prieto, L. P., Sharma, K., Dillenbourg, P., & Jesús, M. (2016). Teaching analytics: Towards automatic extraction of orchestration graphs using wearable sensors. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (pp. 148–157). ACM.
Ravenscroft, A., Schmidt, A., Cook, J., & Bradley, C. (2012). Designing social media for informal learning and knowledge maturing in the digital workplace. Journal of Computer Assisted learning, 28(3), 235–249.
Roschelle, J., Dimitriadis, Y., & Hoppe, U. (2013). Classroom orchestration: Synthesis. Computers & Education, 69, 523–526.
Sharples, M. (2013). Mobile learning: Research, practice and challenges. Distance Education in China, 3(5), 5–11.
Sharples, M. (2015). Seamless learning despite context. Seamless learning in the age of mobile connectivity (pp. 41–55). Singapore: Springer.
Sotsenko, A., Zbick, J., Jansen, M., & Milrad, M. (2016). Flexible and contextualized cloud applications for mobile learning scenarios. In Mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive learning (pp. 167–192). Springer International Publishing.
Spikol, D., & Milrad, M. (2008). Physical activities and playful learning using mobile games. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(03), 275–295.
Vogel, B., Kurti, A., Milrad, M., Johansson, E., & Müller, M. (2014). Mobile inquiry learning in Sweden: Development insights on interoperability, extensibility and sustainability of the LETS GO software system. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 17(2), 43–57.
Wong, L.-H., & Looi, C.-K. (2011). What seams do we remove in mobile-assisted seamless learning? A critical review of the literature. Computers & Education, 57(4), 2364–2381.
Wong, L. H., Milrad, M., & Specht, M. (Eds.). (2015). Seamless learning in the age of mobile connectivity. Singapore: Springer.
Zurita, G., Baloian, N., & Frez, J. (2014). Using the cloud to develop applications supporting geo-collaborative situated learning. Future Generation Computer Systems, 34, 124–137.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kohen-Vacs, D., Milrad, M., Jansen, M. (2019). Towards an Architectural Approach to Supporting Collaborative Seamless Learning Experiences. In: Looi, CK., Wong, LH., Glahn, C., Cai, S. (eds) Seamless Learning. Lecture Notes in Educational Technology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3071-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3071-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-3070-4
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-3071-1
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)