Engineering Hybrid Learning Communities: The Case of a Regional Parent Community †
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Related Research
3. The Mobile2Learn Approach: A Hybrid Parent Community
3.1. Developing a Hybrid Parent Community
3.2. Derived Requirements
- Anonymous visitors are normal people visiting the website without being logged in. They have read-only access to a limited set of articles (as incentives for registration) and the discussion forum.
- Parents are visitors who already created an account and are logged in. They are able to read all articles, view all galleries, recommend items, comment on items, rate items, and hand in ideas and drafts for new articles or taken photos. They can also use the internal messaging system, the discussion forum with read-write access, and can create their own profile page.
- Partners are special accounts, not for individuals, but for institutions such as kindergartens, daycare providers, and (child) doctors. The reason for differentiating between normal users (parents) and institutional partners is to highlight professionals on the platform. If parents have questions and a doctor answers them, it should be clearly visible that this is a professional answer. Also, institutional partners have extended options for their profile. This way they can use the platform for advertising themselves (e.g., providing some text describing the institution and a link to their website).
- Lecturers are partners who conduct an educational event in the offline (real) world. Thus, they provide official documentation of the events as educational articles.
- Authors are accounts which are able to create, edit, review and publish content (articles, photo galleries, quizzes) on the platform. They are also able to send e-mail and SMS newsletters. Tagging is limited to authors in order to ensure a consistent taxonomy.
- Basic functions include minimum requirements for community platforms such as providing ways to register, log in and retrieve lost passwords as well as an administrative interface for managing configurations, users, etc.
- Community features include communication support (internal messaging, e-mail newsletters, forums, commenting of artifacts, invite friends, recommend articles), rating of artifacts, and avatars.
- A sophisticated content management system (CMS) which allows for easily adding and editing content online. The CMS must also be capable of providing different templates as well as layouts (e.g., for a different look of official and user-generated content) and workflow support (users can add new articles, reviewing/publishing by some other person).
- Mobile phone (SMS) integration across the whole system (to be usable for users without an e-mail address just by a mobile phone number or in addition to e-mail). This includes registration (including verification of the mobile phone number), lost password functions, SMS newsletters, and artifact recommendations. If a user provides a mobile phone number as well as an e-mail-address, the default should be to use e-mail for cost reasons (except for the newsletters which are specifically designed for SMS).
- Privacy options and sophisticated rights management as required by German law, the German user base and their expectations, and the design of our approach. Parents should be able to use a nick name in order to mask their real identity, the forum needs to be read-only for non-registered users, galleries and articles need to be configurable as public or not, and the avatar and user profile page of parents have to be visible to registered users only. Especially the public vs. non-public articles need special attention. Often (links to) not readable articles are just hidden. If one wants to use them as incentives for registration however, they need to be visible, but highlighted as “non-accessible” (e.g., by a lock symbol). Moreover, if a user tries to access a non-readable article, a page containing the option to login and explaining the advantages of registering should be shown instead of a plain “access denied” message.
- Support for different user roles (i.e., partners and parents) which requires different registration pages (different attributes are requested for each role; also, partner profiles need to be verified and activated manually), highlighting of partner posts in discussion forums, and public extended profile pages for partners, and a public list of all partners.
- Advanced logging and tracking is especially required for evaluation of the system and generation of (anonymized) statistics for authors. Thus, the system needs to track who accessed what artifacts (articles, galleries, clicks on newsletters, logins), who recommended what to whom, who invited whom, and meta-data of internal messaging.
- Easy extensibility for adding further special requirements and modules/plugins: This particularly includes a software license which allows editing the source code (commercial or open source) as a key requirement. Our special requirements include changes to the forum in order to allow parents to start anonymous threads. Modules are also required for providing automatic recommendations (of artifacts and upcoming events), offline registration (parents fill out a paper form for registering to the online platform, authors create an account and send an activation key to the e-mail-address and mobile phone number in order to allow registering “from everywhere”), a module for interactive quizzes, and a special module for managing the offline events (i.e., managing of event locations, the events themselves, and keeping track of event attendances of parents, whether registered in the system or not).
No. | Title | Short Description | Cluster(s) | Use Case(s) |
---|---|---|---|---|
FR1 | Register online | Allow visitors to register to the community platform. Registration should request visitors to enter a nickname, a password and to confirm the privacy statement. The registration process needs to support the different roles of parents and partners. Parents additionally need to enter a mobile phone number and/or an e-mail address, their real name, (postal) home address, birth date, gender and optionally the names and birthdates of their children. For partners the institutional name, the postal address, a telephone number and the name of a responsible person is required additionally. The process needs to make sure that entered e-mail-addresses and/or mobile numbers are valid. Partner registrations should not be enabled by default. The system should send a confirmation/welcome message to the e-mail address and/or mobile phone number. | Basic functions, Mobile phone (SMS) integration and Support for different user roles | UC1, UC1.1, UC1.2 |
FR2 | Input offline registrations | Allow authors to input the data of parents who registered (offline) using a paper form into the system. The system should send a confirmation/welcome message to the e-mail address and/or mobile phone number. | Easy extensibility | UC1, UC1.1, UC18 |
FR3 | Log in | The system needs to allow users to log in using their e-mail address or mobile phone number and their password. | Basic functions and Mobile phone (SMS) integration | UC8 |
FR4 | Retrieve new password | Registered users who lost their password need a way to retrieve a new one (by e-mail or SMS), For cost reasons e-mail should have precedence. | Basic functions and Mobile phone (SMS) integration | UC14 |
FR5 | Manage users | Authors and system administrators must be able to manage registered users (e.g., listing, activating, deactivating). | Basic functions | UC18 |
FR6 | Use internal messaging | Logged in users need the ability to send internal messages to each other. | Community features | UC7 |
FR7 | Use forums/bulletin board | The system must provide a forum, which is readable by all visitors. Creating new threads or answering should be limited to registered users. Logged in parents need to ability to create threads anonymously. Answers of partners need to be clearly displayed as such. The forum also should send notifications on new activity on monitored threads. | Community features and Privacy options and sophisticated rights management | UC6, UC6.1, UC6.2 |
FR8 | View and edit user profiles | The system must support user profile pages and avatar pictures for registered users. This also includes editing the profile and related information. The system also needs to support different styles of profile pages for parents (simple) and partners (more advanced). The profiles of parents must only be visible to logged in users; the profiles of partners should be publicly viewable (same applies to the avatar pictures). | Community features, Support for different user roles and Privacy options and sophisticated rights management | UC2, UC9, UC9.1, UC13 |
FR9 | Invite friends | Logged in users should be able to send invitation e-mails to friends. | Community features | UC10 |
FR10 | Comment on artifacts | Logged in users need to be able to comment on artifacts. Comments should be visible to all users who can view the artifact. There also needs to be an interface for authors to see/review all new comments. | Community features | UC5 |
FR11 | Rate artifacts | Logged in users need to be able to rate artifacts on a one to five star scale. Ratings should be visible to all users who can view the artifact. | Community features | UC12 |
FR12 | Recommend articles | Visitors should be able to recommend articles via e-mail or social media. Registered users should also be able to recommend articles using predefined SMS messages. | Community features and Mobile phone (SMS) integration | UC10 |
FR13 | Send newsletters | Authors must be able the send personalized newsletters to users via e-mail and SMS. Recipients need the ability to unsubscribe. | Easy extensibility and Mobile phone (SMS) integration | UC19 |
FR14 | Retrieve personalized information | The system should use the name of the user to greet them and should provide personalized recommendations to users logged in (artifacts and events) on the start page and in newsletters. | Community features, Mobile phone (SMS) integration and Easy extensibility | UC4 |
FR15 | Add, edit and manage pages/articles | The system must allow the management of articles and pages by authors. Authors should be able to use templates and select different optical layouts for specific articles. Editing of the articles should be done using a WYSIWYG editor which allows to hyperlink other articles easily. The CMS must allow articles to be structured in a hierarchy (in order to reflect the topics of the event series). | Content management system | UC16 |
FR16 | Add, edit and manage photo galleries | The system must allow the management of photos and photo galleries by authors. Photos of the galleries should be usable using the CMS module in order to hyperlink or include them in articles easily. The galleries need to be structured in a hierarchy (in order to reflect event series and concrete events). | Content management system | UC16 |
FR17 | View and manage interactive quizzes | The platform should provide interactive quizzes (e.g., in the form of self-tests) for registered users. This also includes authoring functionality for authors. | Easy extensibility | UC16 |
FR18 | Tag contents | Authors need the ability to tag artifacts in order to link similar artifacts and providing a structure regarding different aspects (based on tags) independently to the hierarchical structure. | Content management system | UC15 |
FR19 | Submit articles/photos | Logged in users should be able to submit photos and articles. Submitted articles should be inserted into the CMS and marked for review for authors. Same applies to photos. | Content management system and Easy extensibility | UC11 |
FR20 | Define visibility/accessibility of contents | Authors must be able to define visibility states (published/under-review state) and accessibility restrictions for anonymous visitors. This includes that links to artifacts which are not accessible are visible and marked with a lock symbol. If such a link is clicked on, the system should provide a special page which contains the advantages of registering, a link to the registration page and a log in form for registered users. Artifacts in the under-review state must be completely invisible to all users despite the editors. | Content management | UC3, UC3.1 |
FR21 | View public list of partners | A list of partners with links to their corresponding profiles must be visible to all visitors. | Easy extensibility | UC2 |
FR22 | Manage offline events | The system must be able to add and edit event series and concrete events (i.e., location, date and time) in order to display it in a structured way. This also includes the ability to enter attendance lists with the platform (i.e., which registered user attended which events). | Easy extensibility | UC17 |
FR23 | Retrieve (real-time) statistics | For continuous feedback and evaluation reasons the system needs to present detailed statistics. This includes statistics about ages of the users, ratings, comments, visit durations, number of read articles (also differentiated between parents who visited a corresponding event or not), number of events attended, distances of parent’s locations of attended events, number of registered user by event location, numbers of parents (total, who visited an event, who live in the district of Goslar, etc.) and partners, information about the timing and order of visiting an event and registering online, number of internal messages sent or friends invited, and reactions/clicks to/on e-mail and SMS campaigns. | Advanced logging and tracking and Easy extensibility | UC20 |
FR24 | Log and track user behavior | The system needs to log errors and collect data about the usage of the platform for statistical evaluations (closely related to FR1, FR3, FR6, FR7, FR9-14, FR22 and FR23). | Advanced logging and tracking | UC20 |
No. | Title | Short Description |
---|---|---|
NFR1 | Extensibility | System must be modular and has to provide application programming interfaces (e.g., for adding new features/modules and for inter module communication). |
NFR2 | Permissive license | We need the right to edit/modify the source code of the system. |
NFR3 | Privacy | The system must comply with German privacy laws and provide low threshold access with nicknames (closely related to FR1, FR7 and FR8). |
NFR4 | Security | The system must be properly designed and implemented with regards to security (e.g., it needs to be resistant against cross-site scripting, SQL injection, session hijacking and other attack vectors of web-based systems). |
NFR5 | Usability/optics | The usability and optics of the community platform must be adequate for the target group. |
NFR6 | Interoperability | The web-based system needs to be compatible with the different wide-spread browsers on desktop and mobile devices. |
4. Designing the Socio-Technical System
4.1. Design Process
4.2. Design Challenges and Changes over Time
- CMS: Concrete5, Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Contao (renamed from TypoLight in May 2010), WordPress
- Wikis: MediaWiki, DokuWiki, MoinMoin
- Generic web frameworks: XOOPS, Zikula (based on phpNuke)
- Bulletin boards (discussion forums): phpBB, yaBB!
- Social network engines: Dolphin, elgg, phpFox, SocialEngine
CMS | Wikis | Generic Web Frameworks | Bulletin Boards | Social Network Engines | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Basic functions | provided by all system types | ||||
Community features | (+) | − | (+) | (+) | + |
Content management system | + | +/- | (+) | − | − |
Mobile phone (SMS) integration | − | − | − | − | − |
Privacy options and sophisticated rights management | +/− | − | + | − | +/− |
Support for different user roles | no general judgment possible | ||||
Advanced logging and tracking | no general judgment possible | ||||
Easy extensibility | +/− | − | + | − | +/− |
5. The Mobile2Learn Hybrid Parent Community after One Year of Usage
6. Evaluation
6.1. Face-to-Face Events
6.2. Online Community Platform
Visit Duration | # | Per cent (n = 1008) |
---|---|---|
0 s to 30 s | 111 | 11 |
30 s to 1 min | 86 | 9 |
1 min to 2 min | 128 | 13 |
2 min to 5 min | 265 | 26 |
5 min to 15 min | 255 | 25 |
15 min to 30 min | 110 | 11 |
30 min to 1 h | 45 | 4 |
1 h+ | 8 | 1 |
6.3. Hypotheses Evaluation
7. Discussion
8. Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Author Contributions
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Strickroth, S.; Pinkwart, N. Engineering Hybrid Learning Communities: The Case of a Regional Parent Community. Systems 2014, 2, 393-424. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems2040393
Strickroth S, Pinkwart N. Engineering Hybrid Learning Communities: The Case of a Regional Parent Community. Systems. 2014; 2(4):393-424. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems2040393
Chicago/Turabian StyleStrickroth, Sven, and Niels Pinkwart. 2014. "Engineering Hybrid Learning Communities: The Case of a Regional Parent Community" Systems 2, no. 4: 393-424. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems2040393