Anytime-Anywhere: Personalised Time Management in Networking for e-Learning

Abstract

Personalisation in the provision of higher education (HE) has gained traction driven by socio-economic, demographic, and employment changes in the student population.  Concomitant with these changes is the evolving capability and ubiquity of mobile technologies.  These developments have resulted in interest in e-learning to accommodate the diverse student population and leverage the power of mobile technologies.  To address the changing educational demands ‘anytime-anywhere' personalised e-learning utilising mobile technologies is becoming ubiquitous in the domain of HE, and increasingly e-learning is embracing Web 2.0 technologies to provide networking functionality at both a pedagogic and personal level.  Personalisation requires the creation of an individual's profile (termed a context), a context defining and describing a user's current state.  This article considers personalised e-learning in a university domain with consideration of networking (in a collaborative and social networking sense).  Following consideration of the factors driving the interest in and take-up of e-Learning (in a mobile context) Web 2.0 technologies will be considered.  The nature of context and context and related research is considered followed by a brief overview of the proposed approach which is designed to enable effective personalisation with constraint satisfaction and predictable decision support.  The article closes with final observations and conclusions