Abstract
Non-formal learning in Communities of Practice (CoPs) makes up a significant portion of today’s knowledge gain. However, only little technological support is tailored specifically towards CoPs and their particular strengths and challenges. Even worse, CoPs often do not possess the resources to host or even develop a software ecosystem to support their activities. In this paper, we describe a distributed, microservice-based Web infrastructure for non-formal learning in CoPs. It mitigates the need for central infrastructures, coordination or facilitation and takes into account the constant change of these communities. As a real use case, we implement an inquiry-based learning application on-top of our infrastructure. Our evaluation results indicate the usefulness of this learning application, which shows promise for future work in the domain of community-hosted, microservice-based Web infrastructures for learning outside of formal settings.
Keywords
- Learning infrastructures
- Microservices
- Communities of Practice
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Acknowledgments
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 687669 (WEKIT) and from the European Union’s Erasmus Plus programme, grant agreement 2017-1-NO01-KA203-034192.
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de Lange, P., Göschlberger, B., Farrell, T., Klamma, R. (2018). A Microservice Infrastructure for Distributed Communities of Practice. In: Pammer-Schindler, V., Pérez-Sanagustín, M., Drachsler, H., Elferink, R., Scheffel, M. (eds) Lifelong Technology-Enhanced Learning. EC-TEL 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11082. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98572-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98572-5_14
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