Personal learning environments from institutional perspective. Applications to the study of personal networks

Resumen

This thesis explores a theoretical strategy that universities could follow in order to take advantage of the benefits and opportunities that offering eLearning 2.0 tools and services to learners could bring about. This strategy is centred in the provisioning of institutionally-powered Personal Learning Environments (iPLEs), which constitute our vision of how Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis), services (del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) and people arrangement and data sharing (social networking, learn-streaming) could be applied in an integrated manner to the learning process. With regards to the empirical part of the thesis, knowing whether an iPLE could transfer Web 2.0 affordances to institutional sphere is very important to move research agenda beyond `cool uses¿ and satisfaction surveys, and to understand how the learning process is affected when students use this new type of environments. More specifically, we are interested in assessing student participation and interaction patterns when working in higher education settings guided by a PLE. With that aim in mind, we try to extend the body of empirical studies about PLEs towards social network analysis using the learning analytics approach. In this sense, we conducted a differential analysis of the student participation and of the configuration of students¿ individual and aggregated personal networks in VLEs and iPLEs. From a scientific point of view, the findings are very promising for PLE research, because they reflect the effectiveness of an iPLE for facilitating student participation and for assisting students in the creation of larger and more balanced personal networks with richer social capital. Finally, this thesis reviews other general aspects of Technology-enhanced Learning (TEL) that have been explored in the literature using other type of learning environments and research methodologies. Particularly, we try to create an evidence base that extends the current empirical body of TEL literature towards the PLE area and the personal network analysis. In this respect, we conducted the following two studies using an iPLE prototype: an analysis of the differences in size, composition and structure between the personal networks of high- and low-performing students; and an analysis of the effect of service multiplexity on the development of students¿ personal networks.