Mobile Personal Learning Environments: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Nowadays personal learning environments appear as student-centered educational spaces to overcome the identified constraints in the institutional learning platforms. However, most of the published research is based only on the use of computers, without considering mobile electronic devices. This article analyses the scientific and academic production on mobile personal learning environments in Higher Education. From a methodological point of view, the research presented here was conducted through a systematic literature review using various resources such as Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, among others. A large number of documents from 2000 to 2016 were initially collected. Subsequently, selection and quality criteria were applied, and a few studies were obtained that were qualitatively analyzed. The results were described in categories according to the original research questions, including research works on mobile devices and personal learning environments, publications on projects of integrated platforms, research where external tools are used with a pedagogical approach, theoretical contributions, and research that evaluates these innovations. In conclusion, mobile personal learning environments are shown as technological scenarios that have been recently introduced in Higher Education. Although successful results have been found, more research is needed to establish generalizations that might be replicable in other contexts.

Keywords

• aprendizaje asistido por ordenador
• autoaprendizaje
• tecnologías de la información y de la comunicación
• aprendizaje móvil
• entornos personales de aprendizaje.