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Portfolios are often used in higher education for learning, promotion, assessment and appraisal. Thanks to technical developments in recent years, portfolios are increasingly digital rather than physical. E-portfolios provide a comprehensive way to document personal progress, to reflect on work activities, to support learning and to serve as a tool for feedback and evaluation. However, there has been very little research conducted on the use of e-portfolios for learning purposes in higher education. This paper focuses on the use of e-portfolios in teacher education. Six students in a master programme work with e-portfolios in the course of their practical vocational training. In a mixed-methods design, the students were interviewed about their experiences and the process of writing e-portfolios. In addition, a document analysis of the e-portfolio entries has been conducted in terms of content and structure. The findings of this study provide indications on how e-portfolios can be used effectively in teacher training and which promoting and inhibiting conditions students encounter.

S-BPM targets Business Process Management and has been applied in various business domains to model business processes and implement workflow support. This chapter investigates S-BPM’s capabilities to support workplace and process design as well as process execution in production companies. Thereby, industrial capabilities of S-BPM are structured along the three dimensions of socio-technical systems which need to be considered for Industry 4.0 developments. Technological capabilities address the ability to integrate processes on different automation levels (planning, monitoring, real-time execution, etc.). Organizational capabilities discuss the potential of subject orientation for organizational development, and human capability development investigates how humans in production companies could be supported when involving them in workplace (re)design.

Incorporating context in business process descriptions has found increasing interest in the business process management (BPM) community. Most approaches are based on a notion of context as a static representation of relevant aspects of a process. This paper proposes that an understanding of context as a process that generates subjective views of context is more beneficial for business process applications. The paper develops a subject-oriented model for the alignment of the individual contextual views of workers and business process experts, as the basis of a framework for developing methods and tools for interactional context.

As more wearable Smart sensors are used in e-Health applications the likelihood of clinical success is as much dependent on the clinical technology as the patient's acceptance to wear the sensors. By using a human centered design approach and a structured framework to engage the views of developers and end users, sensors have been developed within the OPTIMI project that were iteratively adapted to specifically meet a large number of user needs. As a result they are likely to have a higher user acceptance and low dropout rate during the project's clinical trials. This paper describes the approach taken and the results and experience derived from the project. The method has wider application to wearable ubiquitous computing.

This paper makes the case for using Contextual Design and Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) for analyzing complex business processes in ways that not only support, but in fact actively foster the consideration of the human elements within them. Specifically, the paper provides an outline of the defining characteristics of Contextual Design and S-BPM, following which it presents an outline of an ongoing case study. The presentation of the latter focuses on the lessons learnt and benefits derived from the proposed approach. Overall, Contextual Design allows including in a systematic way the work, usability and technology requirements for the S-BPM method. The combined methodology connects efficient business process management with appropriate contextual design in the workplace. The case study shows that this approach has a high potential for complex business process with specific contextual challenges and for the improvement of business processes with the employment of mobile electronic communication and information technology.

Learner control became a crucial issue for the utilization and (re-)development of e-learning environments. Learners should be able to control the selection and presentation of content, as well as the transfer process itself, according to their needs, learning styles, and preferences. We revisited two e-learning developments, both strengthening learner self-control, but developed on different grounds and following different development paradigms. Scholion implemented learner self-control in a bottom-up approach putting learner needs and preferences upfront. Lab@Future transformed key characteristics of a pedagogical theory into learner tasks and a process to support learning in a top-down approach. Field studies of both approaches revealed several types of learner control to be supportive for self-managed learning processes.

This paper presents Lab@Future, an advanced e-learning platform that uses novel Information and Communication Technologies to support and expand laboratory teaching practices. For this purpose, Lab@Future uses real and computer-generated objects that are interfaced using mechatronic systems, augmented reality, mobile technologies and 3D multi user environments. The main aim is to develop and demonstrate technological support for practical experiments in the following focused subjects namely: Fluid Dynamics - Science subject in Germany, Geometry - Mathematics subject in Austria, History and Environmental Awareness – Arts and Humanities subjects in Greece and Slovenia. In order to pedagogically enhance the design and functional aspects of this e-learning technology, we are investigating the dialogical operationalisation of learning theories so as to leverage our understanding of teaching and learning practices in the targeted context of deployment.