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Developments in the Smart Home sector are increasingly supporting users in their everyday lives and at home. The devices are intelligent, networked and integrated into the environment. With Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), systems have recently made their way into the living room at home. However, the part of formal and informal learning with Intelligent Personal Assistants is not yet exhausted. Yet, IPAs offer an innovative approach to rethink for example classic learning methods with flashcards or partner learning. Are they feasible to support learning at home? IPAs can be used to provide knowledge and can be used for a variety of ways for assessment. This article presents an IPA using the wide-spread Amazon Echo as a realization of a virtual learning partner. Therefore, the prototype combines aspects from the domain of Intelligent Tutoring Systems and the domain of Learning Analytics with the help of a Learning Record Store (xAPI). The presented prototype was evaluated according to the Technology Acceptance Model. The articles closes with conceivable scenarios how IPAs will be able to adapt the physical environment according to the learning goal.

Whether online courses, video-based courses, mobile applications, self- or commercial-developed web 2.0 applications, it is hard to overlook the amount of available digitalized support. Digital media, mobile devices, web applications and apps offer new opportunities to fundamentally redesign the way we think about teaching, studying and research. In this contribution an explanatory framework for the media-didactical design of teaching, learning and research scenarios is presented, which expresses the technical aspects. Afterwards different scenarios, which facilitate the use of digital media, are outlined. The variety of using practices are used as a starting point to outline a concept of a system architecture, which enables on the one hand the automatic provisioning of any desired application and on the other hand the cross-system aggregation of user data in order to facilitate this for the design of teaching and learning environments.

Based on the typical IT infrastructure for e-learning in higher education and the contemporary research on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) the paper shows how existing tools and services can be brought together to meet the needs of modern, technology enhanced classroom-based teaching. For this interdisciplinary development process both traditional software, development methods and existing PLE models offer only little guidance. The paper describes the approach and the interim results of a campus-wide project at the University of Potsdam. Therefore first typical teaching and communication scenarios are identified from which afterwards the requirements for a supporting platform are derived. This leads to a comprehensive collection of considerable services and functions, which have to be integrated according to their specific use in an educational technology system. Based on this fundamental approaches for integration and technical details of this mash up are considered in an overview of all relevant services and gets transferred into an integrated system architecture. The paper describes the exemplary realization using the Liferay portal technology in which the above-defined scenarios are implemented. Additional adjustments with regard to personalized and adaptive learning (and working) environments are supported too and described briefly