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vantages must be clearly communicated (at the right
time) to the students. Nevertheless, only a minority
of all students had used the test bed for a longer time.
Here, guidance with learning questions as in (Hsiao
et al., 2010) may motivate students and foster com-
munication. Until now, overview and learning guid-
ance is given by the visualisation of topic relations on
the start page, the hierarchical and object-oriented or-
ganisation of knowledge in the map and the linking of
knowledge objects.
To take stock, the evaluation of this test bed has
shown that the environment supports SRL and col-
laborative learning in large classes. The answering
of student questions was easier via the chat widget
than by email as all students were able to see the
answer. Additionally, the chat fostered student-to-
student support. Even if the test bed offered support
for early learning, the peak of usage was reached just
before the exam. It indicates the students’ remaining
in power learning.
The test bed was implemented as a cloud learn-
ing application combining widgets as services in an
overall application and using IWC for communication
between the widgets. Since different people were re-
sponsible for the particular widgets, it was sometimes
hard to fix problems e.g. when server were not acces-
sible.
Until now, the test bed was aimed to demon-
strate the possibilities of ROLE technology in large
classes. The demonstration was successful and fur-
ther development has to focus more on the learn-
ing requirements of students. Therefore, future im-
provements are seen in better communication and
feedback support to strengthen e.g. learning motiva-
tion. Suggested improvements are firstly better col-
laboration support by adding improving topic-related
communication (forum, notepad linked to contents
of knowledge map) and secondly better SRL-support
by adding a learning planer that supports planning
(to-do list) and reflection (self-tests, visualisation of
progress). The offering of learning strategies such
as learning questions (Hsiao et al., 2010) within the
learning tool may offer new advantages and motiva-
tion for the students.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research leading to these results has received
funding from the European Community’s Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant
agreement no 231396 (ROLE project). Additional
funding at the RWTH Aachen University was re-
ceived from the Federal Ministry of Education
and Research (BMBF) for the project Excellence
in Teaching and Learning in Engineering Sciences
(ELLI project).
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