The overall goal of CAPPLE project is:

The description and the prospective analysis, both technically and functional, of personal learning environments (PLEs) of the Spanish future professionals in all areas of knowledge. Our aim is to know how these environments are, what are their characteristics, what strategies have been used to set up them and which ones are associated with formal education as well as what type of cross training deficiencies show. This will aim to better understand the processes of creating, managing and enrichment of PLEs and would stimulate the development of strategies to improve their empowerment from formal education, understanding that these are key elements of the educational development of citizens, their digital identity and its life’s long learning skill.

This overall goal decided to implement the following objectives:

  1. Describing specific strategies and tools used routinely by senior university students from all areas of knowledge to enrich and manage their learning, inside and outside the classroom. Especially those that take place in online contexts.
    • Designing a reliable and valid instrument for collecting information about the strategies and tools used by the students to manage and enrich their learning, inside and outside the classroom, especially in online contexts. That is, tools and procedures to acquire, manipulate and recreate information individually as well as collectively, and strategies, tools and processes to share.
    • Describing and classifying learning strategies used by students (self/targeted professional/personal, formal/non-formal/informal) and how they perceive its relevance.
    • Identifying and categorizing ICT tools used by students to learn, both from its technological aspect (social media, social networks, aggregators, free/owners, and so on) as well as in its functional aspect (publishing tools for collaborative knowledge creation, reading tools, multimedia information sources, and so on).
    • For precising if each network tools and learning strategies are used with a specific function or if used with various functions in different contexts.
  2. Analyzing, both technically and functionally the personal learning environments (PLEs) of the Spanish future professionals from all the knowledge areas.
    • Describing and modelling types of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) that appear among the students surveyed.
    • Identifying parts of such environments and the most common components of these PLEs.
    • Examining the level of awareness that students have about their learning processes and their own personal environment.
  3. Achieving a joint analysis of both the components and the models obtained and its educational implications regarding the improvement of strategies aimed at enriching the process of creating and managing PLEs for future professionals  the university.
    • Analyzing the degree and type of influence given by the students to the formal educational institution (the university) as provider of these strategies and described environments, as well as analyzing which of these are perceived by future professionals as acquired in parallel, transverse or tangential to the university.
    • Analysing the differences between the different knowledge areas about the models of PLEs found, as well as the strategies and tools contained therein.
    • Identifying the educational implications on initial training regarding the elements and the models found.
    • Identifying, based on student responses, cross-cutting strategies (technological and training) which would be implemented by Higher Education institutions for the enrichment of the PLEs of future professionals.
    • Making proposals for concrete strategies (technological and training) to be carried out from university contexts to enrich the process of creating and managing the PLEs of future professionals.
  4. Disseminating the data and conclusions of the project and proposing the extension of its scope not only the Spanish university, but to the European and international contexts both in terms of the data being obtained in progression, as the most important conclusions the project itself.