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

Abstract

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' sociocultural 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.