How to Match Mobile Learning Resources with Learners Current Needs: The Didactic Profiling

The Virtual University is a learning environment at the University of Hagen, which is a distance teaching university. The – mainly employed – distance students need assistance in their difficult learning situation in many ways. Main goal of this paper is to provide students with appropriate and reasonable to use learning material any time any location where we assume that our learners have their cell phone, smart phone or PDA at hand if nothing else. We show that the well known technical profiling can only be one part of this assistance. To match the learners needs with available resources, we need to know about the learners attitude, preconditions and take into account the strong impact the situation he is in has on the learning process. Therefore, we developed a didactic profiling system, which is able to provide our students with those (and only those) didactic resources which can reasonably be used under the given conditions.