WIKI-LEARNIA: SOCIAL E-LEARNING IN A WEB 3.0 ENVIRONMENT

The current trend in the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is characterized by providing content to an extraordinarily high number of learners. However, no or inadequate communication and cooperation mechanisms tarnish the learning experience, which is considered as one of the main criticisms. Social networks as a Web 2.0 technology have become a popular information exchange medium which is characterized by diverse, intuitive communication services. Wiki-Learnia as an e-learning 3.0 platform goes one step further by also transparently integrating external portals such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The learner focuses on the essentials and cooperating over different communication channels in parallel to transfer knowledge. Here, not only the usual dialogue between two learners or between teachers and learners should be encouraged, but there’s also the intrinsic motivation to organize learning communities. The resulting crossnetwork information exchange has a strong positive effect on the teaching and learning experience of the community. Wiki-Learnia serves as an information hub for the communication channels of the linked systems. With the help of various semantic filtering mechanisms, the information overload is contained and relevant knowledge is extracted, acquired and distributed. As an integral part of the cross-network search of Wiki-Learnia the information research of the learner as well as the author is facilitated, which in turn supports the firmly in Wiki- Learnia’s philosophy anchored crowdsourcing principle.