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ubiquitous activities, and from formal settings
to informal learning, (iii) adaptive and intuitive
response, (iv) intelligent monitoring process
to adapt to learners expectations and leverage
the exploitation of the learning process, and (v)
evidence of better learning. Details have been
provided in the previous section.
This management should be supported by a
proper application of standards, which requires an
active involvement of the research community in
the standardization bodies. Moreover, an emerging
research direction is related to the PLE, which go
beyond the institutional-driven goals and supple-
ment it with a new model that take into account
the opportunities provided by the Web 2.0 context
and promote user-created learning environments.
There is a need for flexible frameworks that
can be applied to solve the technological and
management problems in different settings, which
not only include distance learning universities but
also curriculum based and vocational education.
Learners in any of these contexts require a per-
sonalized support that meet individual learners'
learning needs.
to other types of educational organizations. In
any case, the core of the approach is to integrate
inclusive support into the educational institution's
existing ICT services infrastructure. The frame-
work supports the full cycle of services inclusive
adaptation by combining universal design ap-
proaches and personalization techniques. On the
one hand, standards and specifications that try to
cover the wide variety of needs are used. On the
other hand, dynamic contextual recommendations
are applied during the course execution.
There are many research, technical and even
organizational open issues related to the frame-
work that has been described in this chapter.
Firstly, till very recently there have not been
general approaches that considered learners and
their evolving circumstances, i.e. prior knowledge,
preferences, learning style, learning activities,
learning goals, learning context (Drachsler et al.,
2007). Moreover, most of the adaptive systems
do not address the accessibility requirements,
which are of major importance to provide an
inclusive support. Secondly, TEL is a long-term
issue which lacks of general and standard-based
approaches. In this chapter we have described an
integrated framework of learning services which
is able to include third-party developments. To
this, a Service-Oriented Architecture that allows
for interoperability, re-usability, composability,
distributivity and discoverability has been de-
signed and implemented.
The required interoperability of applications
and services in the framework goes beyond cur-
rent approaches in a twofold way: (i) providing
the services-based infrastructure to manage the
whole range of standards needed to meet acces-
sibility and adaptations needs of LLL services
through the design and implementation of the
corresponding components, and (ii) covering
the current limitations of adaptive and accessible
scenarios by enabling the integration of compo-
nents that partially solve these needs when they
operate in isolation but which provide a holistic
approach if integrated together. Developments
CONCLUSION
The current student-centered approach is inappro-
priate for an increasing number of students, who
are supposed to benefit from the personal training
but in practice have to face social, physical and
cognitive barriers because they have disabilities.
Accessible e-learning cannot be achieved adopting
a universal design approach alone. Personaliza-
tion techniques have to be considered as well in
order to meet this goal. In this way, the usability
of e-learning systems can be increased for all
learners, since their interaction preferences and
needs are considered.
A general framework based on and adaptive
and accessible standards-based open source ser-
vice oriented architecture has been described. The
approach is designed for HE but can be extended
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