Especially in times where commercial platforms are gaining more and more ground in higher education it is necessary to offer alternative open source platforms.
The Social Learning Environment Spaces is based on WordPress Multisite and developed by an interdisciplinary team consisting of designers, developers, e-learning specialists and students at the TH Köln.
Free of fixed hierarchical role definitions, all members of Spaces can create virtual project- and learning-spaces, maintain portfolios and exchange news and information within their own community. The platform offers functions for the organization of learning and teaching and, in addition, it enables the active and equal participation of all members, similar to a social network. Spaces has been implemented at various institutions, ranging from small, agile design- and film schools to a multi institutional University of Applied Sciences such as the Technical University Cologne.
In this workshop we will present the functional and technical setup of Spaces and show how WordPress Multisite can be used as a social learning environment. We would especially like to discuss ideas with the participants and possibilities on how to extend asynchronous but also synchronous communication as well as notifications in WordPress Multisite environments.