First steps towards an integration of a Personal Learning Environment at university level

Personalization is seen as the key approach to handle the plethora of information in today’s knowledge-based society. It is expected that personalized teaching and learning will address the needs of the learners more efficiently. The education of the future will change by the influence of Web 2.0 contents and the steadily increasing amount of data. This means that the students of tomorrow will regularly have to deal with sharing and merging contents from different sources. Therefore, mashup technology will become a very important means to focus on individual learning needs and to personalize the access to particular information. The following article describes the challenges of Personal Learning Environments at higher education institutions. In the first section, the concept of Personal Learning Environments is presented, while the second section discusses the new challenges that arise for learning with the help of Personal Learning Environments. The third section of the article describes the technical background of Personal Learning Environments and the widget standard in general. In section four, a first prototype of a personal learning environment will be presented, which is integrated into the Technical University of Graz. A detailed description of the available widgets for the prototype, along with a first expert evaluation, will be provided. Finally, the conclusion of the article will sum up the main points of this paper and present the plans for future research together with the prospective developments