Integrating Web 2.0 Features into a Learning Management System

The e-Learning world is overcrowded by Learning Management Systems. Whatever they are Web-based or stand-alone software, lots of them are mere content delivering platforms and only a few provide a good end-user satisfaction. Since now two years, the University of Luxembourg is designing its own Web-based distance learning framework and faces the same problems. Besides, a growing advent called Web 2.0 is gaining ground in various application fields. Briefly speaking, Web 2.0 is about content management and new ways of communication and interaction between users. Currently, this technology is more and more viewed by scientists as a new way of learning. As a consequence, this trend directly competes with e-learning systems. But in the meanwhile, most of features that could be qualified as Web 2.0 compliant could easily be shaped into learning management systems and be a way to overcome their current limits. For instance, users of these future integrated systems would be attracted not only to study a course, but also because they can communicate with other users in a collaborative way and learn from each other. Our paper describes how we challenged this situation by shaping Web 2.0 skills into our e-learning platform named SPOTLight. We designed a brand new solution with innovative interactions and learning perspectives. The paper is structured as follows: first, an overview of the framework is described, followed by social and pedagogical issues of the problematic. Second, a brief introduction to the state of the art of Web 2.0 provides further understanding of collaboration potentialities on the Internet and an analysis details the constraints we faced for each feature according to our context, resulting to a set of tools we decided to integrate into SPOTLight. Afterwards, the development management procedure we used for the implementation is detailed. Indeed, integrating Web 2.0 features creates important new issues in terms of user interface, which make us rebuild the core architecture using software as a service model. Finally, this paper outlines our future strategy about new features from the Web 2.0 world we will progressively add to SPOTLight.