Personal Learning Environments as a Framework for Flexible Learning: Exploring Consensus, Asking Questions and Tracing Challenges

Abstract

Personal Learning Environments (PLE) is a concept, an idea and an approach that proposes a disruptive way of understanding how people learn in today's technologically enriched ecosystems. PLE relocate the role of every actant on learning (what is learning, who learns, who teaches), the nature of relationships among those actants (who is important, what is the role of institutions in learning). After almost 20 years of academic interest, the scope of PLE remains limited as a subject and practice, even though realities such as those exposed by the CoVid-19 crisis highlight the importance of its implementation and development. This paper proposes participatory research and a dialogical approach to explore the state of the art of PLE. It uses a focus group of experts who collaboratively develop mind maps while discussing three questions that illustrate the consensus, recent inquiries and future research needs on the topic. The conclusions of the work offer directions of development that should, in the view of these experts, occupy research and development efforts on PLE and contribute to making this field of study contribute more decisively to a true educational transformation that prioritises people as the focus of interest.