Evaluation on Students' and Teachers' Acceptance of Widget- and Cloud-based Personal Learning Environments

Instead of using traditional learning environments which contain tools and content of a single provider that are often owned by one specific educational organization, the presented idea of Widgetand Cloud-based Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) exploits a variety of existing and developing open educational sources including popular Web2.0 resources such as YouTube, Flickr or Wikipedia. The main contribution of this paper is the analysis of teachers’ and students’ attitudes and reasons for acceptance of widgetand cloud-computing based PLE technology. A quantitative and qualitative comparison of three widget-based PLE scenarios reveals the benefits as well as barriers of the new PLE technology regarding a) learning outcome and b) (cognitive, technical, time-wise) ease of the personal learning process. Findings show that a systematic cloud computing approach software as a service (SaaS) where users do not need to install and run tools locally is preferred. It saves time and meets the needs to keep the personal environment flexible and up to date. But while users have to manage a broad range of tools and content their most essential request is to be efficiently supported by the system in regard to their individual learning needs, e.g. in the decision making process of selecting and evaluating relevant tools.