Abstract
Today, e-learning 2.0 calls for learner-driven learning. Beyond LMSs, which often play as an advanced photocopier, Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) enable teachers and learners to assemble their individual environment from tools available in today's Web 2.0. However, this raises the problem that a large number and different kinds of tools and learning objects LOs need to be available in a format suited for assembly. For example, in the School of Continuing Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SOCE), even though the technology for enabling PLEs within the employed LMS was available, few teachers used it due to a lack of resources useful to their specific topics. The problem of too few resources is aggravated by the high costs of authoring of new resources. One main idea for reducing costs is to enable reuse of LOs and tools (in the Web, tools are often made available as widgets, small interactive software applications typically created with HTML and JavaScript). Reuse with such a broad scope is tackled by different approaches, such as Open Social (OS), IMS LTI, IMS QTI, and SCORM. Recent work investigates simplifying the creation of interactive resources by different means. "Authoring by example" eases tutor development by allowing the author to demonstrate instead of programming. Commercial widget authoring tools like Widget box offer on-line authoring of widgets. However, the types of widgets which the online tools are able to create are too restricted for widespread and frequent use in education. To overcome this problem of PLEs, we put forward a general framework which aims at increasing the usage of interactive learning objects and keeping authoring costs low.