A Conceputal Framework of Requirements for the Development of E-Learning Offerings from a Product Service System Perspective

The term e-learning subsumes all forms learning where electronic media is used for the presentation and distribution of the course content. Although various guidelines and models exist, the development and operation of e-learning offerings has shown to be a difficult task. Often existing approaches focus on single aspects such as technical details or the content of teaching, while neglecting other aspects such as level of service requirements. As e-learning offerings are IT-based systems consisting of hardware, software, and services that have to be considered from a lifecycle perspective, they exhibit similar characteristics as Product Service Systems. We, therefore, suggest designing e-learning offerings from a systems perspective. As a first step, we synthesize a requirements framework for e-learning offerings from the e-learning and PSS literatures. We enrich the framework with examples from a real-life e-learning offering and argue why the PSS approach is useful for the design of e-learning offerings.