Edukapp

UK-wide Higher Education App & Widget Store

A personalized learning environment offers an open eco-system that helps individuals to retrieve content and create (or manage) knowledge in a collaborative way (often utilizing their social networks) and is a modern way of using technology for educational purposes.

Widgets are essential building blocks for creating personal learning environments. Widgets are small, web-enabled tools that provide functionality through a use-case sized user-interface. Widgets manage to decompose complex software activities into small dialogue-based activities, which can be re-used and re-embedded in different containers according to differing contexts.

Countless institutions for Higher Education (particularly in the UK) have invested over recent years into the creation of widgets and into widget-compatible infrastructures to be used in their institutionally promoted personalised learning environments. For example, widely used virtual learning environments such as the open source projects Moodle and Sakai as well as commercially offered software Blackboard and Clix support the integration of widgets into formal learning activities.

A considerable problem, however, is access to this large variety of widgets for learning available. Commercial market places such as Google Gadgets or Apple’s App Store bury any tools for learning and their community of practice under a pile of generic purpose tools and games. They also do not foster the creation of a community of practice around these widgets that is dedicated to learning and teaching. In order to be more accessible, learning widgets need to be catalogued in a way that makes browsing, recommendation, and retrieval easy for a vast community of learners and educators.

The solution to this problem is Edukapp, the cross-university widget store: it's a market place software for end-users and developers to share, annotate, exchange about, recommend, and instantiate widgets and track their afforded practices through logging interaction data.

Edukapp is Open Source (Apache License 2.0).