Objectives:

There are three principal objectives in this project:

1. Firstly, it is the incorporation of a personalised learning environment and network (PLE&N) into the Blackboard Learning Management System (Learn@PolyU) so that it not only supports institutional learning but also social and lifelong learning. The PLE&N functions like a semi-automatic bulletin board with pre-calibrated incoming quality and relevant articles. These articles can be annotated, tagged, commented on and forwarded for discussions.  Learners are not restricted to students and teachers but also include selective graduates and experts from industry. Typically, teachers help to review and safeguard the quality and relevance of the incoming articles, annotate and articulate them with official teaching materials in the classroom and/or in Learn@PolyU. Together, these learners continue to engage in their own customised co-learning environment after a semester is over. A third and side benefit of the PLE&N is that, through collective participation, the community of learners helps to combat information overload by filtering out non-core or less relevant materials.

2. Secondly, the PLE&N will not only be populated with prevailing and relevant articles related to the subject topics but also information related to carrying out background research for tackling assignments and project work in the subject. Doing so provides valuable supporting information for the learners as well as stimulates their interest in learning and applying various research methods, with due consideration of practical constraints, to tackle a problem.  

3. The third objective is to enable scenario/game authoring tools to co-operate with Learn@PolyU so that scenario and game-based learning, which are non-existent in the current Learn@PolyU environment, can be enacted. This extended capability of Learn@PolyU not only enable teachers to add a whole new and increasingly popular dimension to the teaching and illustration of new concepts and principles but also, whenever appropriate, facilitate learners to create scenarios/games as a deliverable of assessable component(s) thereby truly realising a constructivist approach to learning. 

Remarks:

Outcomes & Deliverables:

• Evaluation report on the project "Extending Learn@PolyU as a Learning Management System that Supports Gamification, Social and Lifelong Learning"
• Tsui, E., & Sabetzadeh, F. (2014). Lessons learnt from and sustainability of adopting a personal learning environment & network (PLE&N). Paper presented at the International Conference on Educational Technologies (ICEduTech), Taiwan.
• Tsui, E., Wang, WM., & Sabetzadeh, F. (2014). Enacting personal knowledge management and learning with web services interoperability tools. Paper presented at the 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Intelligence Systems (CCIS), Hong Kong.