Active E-Learning without Worries!

It has been proved how teaching and learning educational processes can largely benefit from the application of ICT-based services, such as collaborative editing and advanced data visualizations, within e-Learning platforms. However, among state-of-the-art solutions, no one is able to tackle the problem in a comprehensive way. In this paper, we propose ALDO (Active e-Learning by DOing), a novel, advanced digital framework supporting integrated facilities for effective, active e-Learning. ALDO includes an active repository for collecting/sharing relevant materials, collaborative editing services for enriching so collected “raw” materials, and advanced data visualization tools (e.g., interactive maps, graphs, and timelines) to explore the spatial and temporal dimension of specific data contexts. ALDO technological infrastructure has been conceived and realized within the European Horizon 2020 Project DETECt (Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives), focusing on the specific data context of European crime narrative; however, its generality makes it suitable for any type of study/teaching activity. More in details, ALDO consists of a multifunctional digital infrastructure (back-end) for the integration of collaborative editing and e-Learning activities in formal and informal educational contexts. The platform supports effective services for collecting, sharing, retrieving, and analyzing data, together with advanced online collaboration tools, an e-Learning platform and advanced data visualization tools, all made available to teachers/students through a dedicated Web portal (front-end). The design and creation of above tools and services for teaching, together with their uses, are presented and discussed through a series of real examples taken from DETECt.