An Approach for Visually Supporting the Creation of Personal Development Plans

Personal Development Plans (PDP) have positive effects in learners’ motivation and confidence since they enable individuals to reflect upon their own learning and to plan for their own educational development according to their personal interests, background and experience. Despite those benefits, there are not many efforts considering the role of learners in the creation of their own learning paths. In this paper we adopt the approach of concept mapping to propose and implement a visual approach for supporting learners in the exploration of existing learning paths and the creation of their PDP. The paper also describes a user study for preliminarily evaluating the implemented tool and discusses the most significant findings around three main issues of interest: understanding of the tool purpose, suitability of the graphic elements shown in the interface, and changes or additions that would improve the usability of the tool.

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