A Summary Writing Course for Language Students in a Personal Learning Environment: PERLE UNICAL

The aim of this paper is to present a Summary Writing Course in the PerLE Unical Personal Learning Environment. PerLE is an open source, online learning environment, conceived both as a response to a perceptible modern shift in learning paradigms and also to overcome the well-known limitations of Learning Management Systems. This is achieved by extending their use through the employment of more flexible learning systems which enable student-centred engagement in activities characterized by collaboration, interoperability and creativity. Learning today is seeing an ever-increasing employment of e-learning and computer-mediated activity in support of blended learning courses, and there is also a challenging shift towards the use of courses managed exclusively online. Another important aspect is the perceived need to promote non-formal and informal learning as indicated in European Commission recommendations, in a context in which learning is considered a lifelong activity and no longer limited to formal and institutional content and validation requirements. In this paper, we propose a Summary Writing Course conceived primarily as a support element in a specific formal university syllabus. The course has been developed in the PerLE platform exploiting extensive functionalities (LAMS, Moodle) and Web 2.0 tools. Its use is, furthermore, constantly updated and enriched by newly developed elements as they become available. It demonstrates the efficacy of a dynamic assembly approach in the creation of e-courses using reusable learning objects. The proposed course activities allow the instructor to introduce the students to a collaborative learning environment in which tasks and activities involve them in an online community promoting “learning by doing”. This student-centred approach enables a shift from passive to active learning which is creative and distributive.