PLEs

Symbaloo aggegator (Source: www.symbaloo.com)

A PLE, or personal learning environment, is a customised online study space, built by and for an individual. In some ways, PLEs stand between, and serve to connect, PLNs and e-portfolios. Firstly, a PLE can be seen as a subset of an individual’s wider PLN in which focused learning occurs at a particular time, usually for a limited period during a course of study. Secondly, a PLE can be an important stage in the development of an e-portfolio. Inspired by the social networking principle of organising webpages around people rather than topics, PLEs are actually quite similar to e-portfolios except that they are not usually designed for public display. At the end of a course of study, a student might select his/her/their best work from a PLE and export it as an e-portfolio, which would serve to document achievements and could function as a kind of digital CV to show potential employers.

It has been argued in recent years that PLEs represent an improvement on sometimes rather rigid, one-size-fits-all institutional LMSs, or VLEs. While PLEs and VLEs are in some ways at opposite ends of a continuum of online study spaces, research has been carried out into how individually customised PLEs might be combined with institutional VLEs in such a way that they can function as complementary spaces. To find out more about this area, check out the research on NGDLEs (next generation digital learning environments), which are likely to be increasingly complemented by artificial intelligence (AI):

• • • 7 Things You Should Know about … NGDLE (ELI, 2015)
    • The NGDLE: We are the Architects (Malcolm Brown, 2017)
    • From LMS to NGDLE: The Acronyms of the Future of Online Learning (Steve Baule, 2019)
    • Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) (Hurix, 2023)
    • Learning Management System vs Next-Generation Digital Learning Environments (eLearning Partners, 2023)

Essentially, a PLE allows students to develop an online presence which draws together all of the people and resources associated with their course of study. Students might collect:

• • their own written work, including notes, drafts, and final submissions
  • their own multimedia work, such as annotated photos, podcasts, or digital stories
  • feedback and commentary from peers and/or teachers

In addition, students might link to their wider PLN by building in:

• • other elements of their online presence, such as blogs; microblogging accounts on services like Twitter/X or Bluesky; social sharing accounts on services like Flickr, Instagram or YouTube; or social networking accounts on services like Facebook – these aspects of their online presence could simply be displayed as links, or alternatively as RSS feeds, which is often made very easy in contemporary website design templates
  • sites of interest and/or relevance to their studies and work

Like e-portfolios, PLEs do not depend on a single piece of software, but can be built on websites, blogs, wikis or social networking sites, or they may even make use of aggregator services. One very popular and easy-to-use aggregator service is Symbaloo, seen in the image at the top of this page. It has already been employed for many years in education, as demonstrated in the video below, where a US school student discusses her use of Symbaloo to create a PLE for her science class. Alternatively, PLEs can be built using dedicated e-portfolio software. In the future they may increasingly be built within the structure of an NGDLE, potentially making use of AI functionality (see above).

Last update: March 2025.