Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is an application domain that generally addresses all types of technology research & development aiming to support teaching and learning activities. Information retrieval is a pivotal activity in TEL, and the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest during the past years.Recommendation methods, techniques and systems open an interesting new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching. There are plenty of resources available on the Web, both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors) that can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with meaningful guidance in order to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices. Its main goal was to bring together researchers and practitioners who are working on topics related to the design, development and testing of recommender systems in educational settings as well as present the current status of research in this area and create cross-disciplinary liaisons between the RecSys and EC-TEL communities. Overall, its contributions outline the rich potential of TEL as an application area for recommender systems and identify the challenges of developing such systems in a TEL context.

Serious games open up many new opportunities for complex skills learning in higher education. The inherent complexity of such games though, requires large efforts for their development. This paper presents a framework for serious game design, which aims to reduce the design complexity at both conceptual, technical and practical levels. The approach focuses on a relevant subset of serious games, labelled scenario-based games. At the conceptual level it identifies the basic elements that make up the static game configuration; it also describes the game dynamics, i.e. the state changes of the various game components in the course of time. At the technical level it presents a basic system architecture, which comprises various building tools. Various building tools will be explained and illustrated with technical implementations that are part of the Emergo toolkit for scenario-based game development. At the practical level, a set of design principles are presented for controlling and reducing game design complexity. The principles cover the topics of game structure, feedback and game representation, respectively. Practical application of the framework and the associated toolkit is briefly reported and evaluated.

This article argues that there is a need for Personal Recommender Systems (PRSs) in Learning Networks (LNs) in order to provide learners advice on the suitable learning activities to follow. LNs target lifelong learners in any learning situation, at all educational levels and in all national contexts. They are community-driven because every member is able to contribute to the learning material. Existing Recommender Systems (RS) and recommendation techniques used for consumer products and other contexts are assessed on their suitability for providing navigational support in an LN. The similarities and differences are translated into specific requirements for learning and specific requirements for recommendation techniques. The article focuses on the use of memory-based recommendation techniques, which calculate recommendations based on the current data set. We propose a combination of memory-based recommendation techniques that appear suitable to realise personalised recommendation on learning activities in the context of e-learning. An initial model for the design of such systems in LNs and a roadmap for their further development are presented.

Societal changes demand educators to apply new pedagogical approaches. Many educational stakeholders feel that serious games could play a key role in fulfilling this demand, and they lick their chops when looking at the booming industry of leisure games. However, current toolkits for developing leisure games show severe shortcomings when applied to serious games. Developing effective serious games in an efficient way requires a specific approach and tool set. This article describes the EMERGO methodology and generic toolkit for developing and delivering scenario-based serious games that are aimed at the acquisition of complex cognitive skills in higher education. Preliminary evaluation results with case developers using the EMERGO methodology and toolkit and with learners using EMERGO cases are presented.

This paper examines how learning outcomes from playing serious games can be enhanced by including scripted collaboration in the game play. We compared the quality of advisory reports, that students in the domain of water management had to draw up for an authentic case problem, both before and after collaborating on the problem with (virtual) peer students. Peers studied the case from either an ecological or governance perspective, and during collaboration both perspectives had to be confronted and reflected upon. This paper argues why such type of workplace-based learning scenarios are important for professional development, describes how serious gaming scenarios can be designed to support such complex learning, and reports data on student satisfaction and learning effects of including scripted collaboration. Preliminary results from a pilot study with 12 students show that including scripted collaboration significantly enhances the quality of learning outcomes. Collaboration and serious games for complex learningSerious games are games that can educate, train or inform, either because they have been deliberately designed for learning or just happen to do so by coincidence. Educators call them 'serious' to denote that they are not just fun to play, but also hold potential as cognitive tools for learning and professional development (eg, Michael & Chen, 2006;Prensky, 2006;Rayburn, 2007). Serious games are supposed to offer many new learning opportunities and positive effects on learner motivation and learning outcomes (eg, De Freitas, 2006;Kiili, 2007;Shaffer, 2006). As opposed to serious games, leisure (or amusement) games have already become adopted widely by the new generation of learners. The leisure games industry and educational institutes so far barely have worked together, and continue to act from separated worlds and objectives. The mind set on learning exudes an air of calm reflection, concentration and investigation, while the mind set on gaming is driven by amusement, fast fun and relaxation. Also, to counterbalance this presumed contradiction, educators have started using the term 'serious games' to indicate that games can be both instructive and meaningful for learning, and playful and fun at the same time. Technology (2010Technology ( ) doi:10.1111Technology ( /j.1467Technology ( -8535.2010 Serious games can provide immersive learning opportunities. Some appear crucial for competences required for modern citizens and professionals in business and industry in the current information age. Learning can no longer remain restricted to acquiring knowledge of content matter, but also has to deal with selecting and using this knowledge for certain problem situations in the workplace. Such more complex learning is about acquiring competences like information skills, media literacy, problem-solving, communication and collaboration, and critical reflection about wicked problems. Such competences are usually not addressed by other learning platforms (Gee, 2003). The objective of this study was to see ...