Learning as a Service: A Web-Based Learning Framework for Communities of Professionals on the Web 2.0

With the advent of the Web 2.0 technologies, web-based learning is shifting to new learning community driven requirements. While the success of web-based learning (still) requires a careful selection of appropriate communication/collaboration tools, the underlying software methodology is shifting from (passive) content consumption towards (active) content creation. Even more, the professionals’ socio-cultural background influences the attitude towards the collaberatively created learning contents. Thus, successful web-based learning community hosting for professionals depends on a comprehensive cross-media support such as capabilities to share drawings, animations, pictures, digital videos, texts etc. among users. In this paper, we present the “Learning As a Service” (LAS) framework. LAS is an approach supporting web-based learning for professionals on the Web 2.0. It employs advanced multimedia technologies in order to promote a wide range of web-based learning community information systems for interdisciplinary, intercultural as well as intergenerational learning. We present a set of services on the basis of LAS showing best practices for various application scenarios.