Not Yet Ready for Everyone: An Experience Report about a Personal Learning Environment for Language Learning

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a mash-up of learning services. It enables students and teachers to assemble a work environment that is adapted to a domain and specific individual needs. In this article, we report on our experiences on using a PLE for Language Learning in five French lectures at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Continuing Education School. We found that while a PLE has the potential to simplify access to and usage of Web sites and services for language learning, students will use it only if properly motivated. Furthermore, at the time being, difficulties that result from the user interface and technical implementation make the interactions with PLEs difficult. The problems need to be overcome in order for PLEs to become adopted by the average, not technically highly literate students and teachers.