A Systematic Review and Trend Analysis of Personal Learning Environments Research

The concept of personal learning environments (PLEs) is relatively new and is continuously developing. Over the past decade, there has been a significant upsurge in the number of PLEs-related research. Nevertheless, there is a lack of recent systematic reviews and trend analysis covering many PLEs studies; to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, the current systematic review is significant and indispensable in reviewing journal articles that discussed PLEs between 2000 and 2020. We searched Web of Science, Scopus, Sciences Direct, JSTOR, Springer, Google Scholar, and IEEE Xplore for studies published in English without limit in location or time to retrieve accurate results. Trend graphics for the extracted themes were also analyzed using descriptive statistics in Excel. According to the defined inclusion criteria, one hundred forty-eight articles were selected for the analysis. This study reveals that literature on PLEs has progressed from 2000 to 2020; the majority of PLEs-related articles were published between 2011 and 2020, with the year 2013 having the highest number of published articles (17 articles), followed by 16 papers published in both years 2014 and 2017. We found that the published PLEs research originated from 46 countries; 26 (17.6%) were from Spain. The majority of the authors had education, computer science, information technology and engineering backgrounds. This review also showed that numerous platforms had been used in PLEs research, with Web 2.0 the most commonly used platform. We noted that the most common objectives of the included articles were PLEs custom system development, analysis of the PLEs, description of experiments, investigations, development of factor models, framework development, and examination. The most common theoretical perspectives in the published articles were self-regulated learning, self-directed learning, and constructivism. The current systematic review and trend analysis can become a guidance platform for researchers, educators, policymakers or even journal publishers for future research in PLEs research.

Teachers' Perspective on Personal Learning Environments via Learning Management Systems Platform

In recent years, the landscapes of teaching and learning has changed because of the utilization of information and communications technologies. In this context, the most illustrative innovations are Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Despite of the LMS and PLEs popularity in ed-ucational contexts as well as the expand set of tools and services that they offer to learners and teachers; they are still in fancy stages. In order to present the challenges Personal Learning Environments were presented; however, it is obvious that PLEs will not replace LMS. Therefore, both types of environments should coexist and interact. In this manner, the current study took teachers’ perspective on integrating the third generation LMS into PLEs. In addition, this study conducted to find out the teachers’ perspective on how the LMS could enhance PLEs in terms of planning before applying the PLE's; designing a framework in the PLE’s; imple-menting the PLEs; interacting in PLEs; managing the learning process through the PLEs and utilizing technolo-gy in PLEs. The participants of the study were 575 teachers who were selected randomly from Saudi Arabia schools. The findings of this study found that teachers must apply a positive teaching approach, holding that knowledge is composed upon student-to-student interaction as well as student-to-teacher interaction. Further-more, this study revealed that teachers must enterprise, deliver, and support K-12 online learning.

Analysis of Psychometric Properties and Validation of the Personal Learning Environments Questionnaire (B-PLE) in Higher Education Students

We are living through a cultural transition, characterized by technological disruption and the erosion of the modern ideology, which are redefining the behavior of citizens in their physical and digital spaces. Virtuality emerges as a new human dimension, making it necessary to rethink social and educational paradigms for a new two-dimensional citizen. In this context, the psychometric features and validation procedure of an instrument (B-PLE) for analyzing Personal Learning Environments (PLE) in students of higher education institutions in the Biobío Region of Chile are described. There were four phases to the validation method: (i) content validity, as determined by six experts in education and ICT; (ii) pilot test, with a non-probabilistic sample of 327 subjects; (iii) principal components analysis (PCA); and (iv) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results of the dimensional analysis made it possible to define the structure of the new instrument, explaining 72% of the total variance. The reliability analysis yielded an alpha coefficient of 0.92. The confirmatory factor analysis showed fit indexes that support the proposed theoretical model. In conclusion, the instrument was composed of three latent variables: Open learning (OL), with six questions, Information management (IM), with two questions, and Knowledge creation and transfer (KCT), with three questions.