Impact of Context-awareness on the Architecture of Learning Support Systems

Recently, the situatedness of learning has come to the center of attention in both research and practice, also a result of the insight that traditional learning methods in the form of large decontextualized courses lead to inert knowledge; i.e., knowledge that can be reproduced, but not applied to real-world problem solving. In order to avoid the inertness, pedagogy tries to set up authentic learning settings, an approach increasingly shared in e-learning domain. If we consider professional training, it is the immediacy of purpose and context that makes it largely different to learning in schools or academic education. This immediacy has the benefit that we actually have an authentic context that we need to preserve. The majority of current elearning approaches, however, ignores this context and provides decontextualized forms of learning as a multimedia copy of traditional presence seminars. We show how making learning solutions aware of the context actually affects their architecture and present a showcase solution in the form of the Learning in Process service-oriented architecture.