Towards supporting multigenerational co-creation and social activities: Extending learning analytics platforms and beyond

Abstract

As smart technologies pervade our everyday environments, they change what people should learn to live meaningfully as valuable participants of our society. For instance, ubiquitous availability of smart devices and communication networks may have reduced the burden for people to remember factual information. At the same time, they may have increased the benefits to master the uses of new digital technologies. In the midst of such a social and technological shift, we could design novel integrated platforms that support people at all ages to learn, work, collaborate, and co-create easily. In this paper, we discuss our ideas and first steps towards building an extended learning analytics platform that elderly people and unskilled adults can use. By understanding the characteristics and needs of elderly learners and addressing critical user interface issues, we can build pervasive and inclusive learning analytics platforms that trigger contextual reminders to support people at all ages to live and learn actively regardless of age-related differences of cognitive capabilities. We discuss that resolving critical usability problems for elderly people could open up a plethora of opportunities for them to search and exploit vast amount of information to achieve various goals.