Outcome-oriented Fitness Measurement of Personal Learning Environments

Personal learning environments (PLEs) comprise a new kind of learning technology which aims at putting learners into centre stage, i.e. by empowering them to design and use environments for their learning needs and purposes. While a lot of research and development is going on in realizing and providing technical PLE solutions, less effort is spent in examining the ‘fitness’ of PLEs. By fitness we refer to the property of a PLE that it is successfully used to achieve a goal. In this paper we attempt to formalize the PLE fitness by focusing on one specific aspect, namely on outcomes of PLE-based activities. For this purpose, we analyze a certain kind of PLE outcomes, i.e. publications, by measuring their impact and use real-world data harvested in the Web to propose a mathematical fitness model. Furthermore, we address factors characterizing the fitness of a publication as well as preliminaries of our approach. The paper concludes with pointing out related findings from other fields and possible future work on outcome-oriented PLE fitness measurement.