Personal Learning Environments: Modeling Students' Self-Regulation Enhancement through a Learning Management System Platform

A personal learning environment (PLE) is known as a crucial support for educators who lead learners through the process of collection, creation, and organization of personalized learning tools. In this manner, the learner can interpret a variety of new tools in their own interest, which makes the learning process easier. The PLE approach represents a considerable movement away from traditional learning, where learners are considered consumers of information through isolated channels, particularly learning management systems (LMSs), to a model where learners draw significant connections from numerous resources that they choose. Thus, educational settings have implemented LMSs fully into their respective learning contexts. In this sense, LMS is identified as a learning platform that helps learners and educators submit assignments, share ideas, and communicate through web-based systems with numerous benefits. Under these circumstances, self-regulation is addressed as a significant component that explains how learners build and manage PLEs and come up with more choices;they take ownership of their own learning and enhance self-regulated learning (SRL) practices. On this occasion, there is a belief that teachers can utilize LMSs to shift from passive to active learning and to improve self-reflection (SR). Therefore, considering all the above issues, the current study examines integrating a third-generation LMS to enhance learners’SR. This study considered PLEs by utilizing Zimmerman’s SRL model to investigate the integration of the third-generation LMS. SR is applied in this study in the form of a pretest and posttest following the involvement of the PLE course, which was designed and applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the experimental findings of the current study formulated a model of SR factors in PLEs through the LMS platform with partial least squares structural equation modeling (SEM) before and after the intervention. Author

Digital Writing Practices in the Information Age: Possibilities and Implications for English Language Teachers and Learners

The purpose of this chapter is to review a selection of recent studies of writing practices and research in order to synthesise and discuss the growing importance of technology orientation and digital literacy in English language learning and teaching. For this purpose, adopting a top-down framework, the chapter touches upon the issues of learning management systems (LMSs), personal learning environments (PLEs) and learning on language learning and teaching with examples of Symbaloo, writing correction, similarity and word-formation tools and feedback in digital classrooms. Finally, the chapter also provides an insight into and some examples of the current implementations in writing practices in online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this chapter, we explore current practices and research in the field of English language teaching and seek to shed light on this issue by overviewing the writing practices and online digital writing tools applied on a global scale in order to enhance interaction. More specifically, this chapter covers LMSs and PLEs, digital writing tools, content similarity detection tools, and student/teacher interaction and feedback in virtual classrooms with a special emphasis on learner autonomy. The results of this study have some far-reaching implications for language teachers, learners, language planners and curriculum developers. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Collaborative Framework for Customized E-Learning Services by Analytic Hierarchy Processing

Thanks to the drastic proliferation of the Internet, e-learning has been recognized as an effective medium for various kinds of aggressive learners. However, due to the deficiencies of tutoring and guiding functionalities in current learning platforms, casual learners may deviate from the original course direction with frustration, when confronting inflexible course materials and fixed learning models. In the post-COVID-19 era, we believe that the most important functionality for a personal learning environment (PLE) to offer is a course recommendation process which adaptively provides a versatile course combination scheme for different learners from different perspectives. In this paper, we propose a flexible framework for users to customize their e-learning environment based on a two-stage Analytical Hierarchical Processing (AHP) structure for building adaptive course portfolios, which adaptively provides a versatile course scheme for different learners. The main objective of our framework is to transform a learner from a role of passively accepting the course content organized by instructors, into another role of proactively selecting the courses and contributing their knowledge to continuously improve the learning platform. We believe the approach proposed is a versatile way for supporting various challenges for the next generation of personal e-learning environment. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Has Covid-19 emergency instruction killed the PLE?

In this article we will explore recent studies that reveal that the use of technologies for educational purposes has never been so intense as during the Covid-19 pandemic. The successive confinements imposed by governments around the world resulted in the increased use of technologies to keep basic educational tasks flowing and millions of teachers and learners adapted their teaching and learning practices to the use of technologies to communicate, teach and learn. Despite that we argue that the imposition of learning technologies, of predetermined educational practices and the prioritization of basic teaching and learning functions has potentially jeopardized the ingenuity that underlies the construction of a personal learning environment, hopefully in a non-permanent way. © 2021 Owner/Author.