ThirdSpace: orchestrating collaborative activities in PLEs for formal learning

ThirdSpace is a platform that allows instructors to orchestrate collaborative learning activities within students' personal learning environments (PLEs). It publishes learning tasks and monitors their completion by students in their PLE tools like blogs. This addresses the need to bring structure to self-regulated learning while respecting the student-centered nature of PLEs. ThirdSpace retrieves learning activities defined as workflows, publishes them to student PLEs, and notifies instructors when activities are completed through awareness features and social networking posts. The goal is to support formal learning through collaborative scripts while leveraging the social and open aspects of PLEs.