Personalized Virtual Campus Journey Adaptation to User Controlled Experience Bakhtiyor ESANOV a,1 and Ajantha DAHANAYAKE a a Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT Abstract. Increasingly, educational institutes are migrating into mobile platforms and mobile app technology to communicate, advertise, and dissimilate education- related information to their stakeholders using virtual campus journey mobile apps. Campus journey mobile apps generally provide standardized generic customization to their user base, incorporating a list of favorite touchpoints based on the users' frequent behaviors. In the literature, personalization, and customization, definitions are mixed-up and inter-changed with no proper separation of these two concepts. In this research, the personalized virtual journey is examined according to the user's preference. It includes creating and updating the personalized virtual campus journey path as an activity of the user and having it as an integral part of the personalized virtual campus journey application. This research presents the concept structure, design, implementation, and evaluation results of the personalized virtual campus journey mobile app development according to the user's preferences with the user given the ability to control his or her own virtual journey experience. Keywords. Virtual journey, virtual campus, virtual campus app design, personalization, explicit user-controlled experience. 1. Introduction A 2020 global survey among e-commerce decision-makers revealed that 78 percent of global e-commerce companies are planning on investing more into the realization of personalization [1]. As of October 2020, nearly 4.66 billion people (59 percent of the global population) are active internet users. Ninety-one percent (91%) of these users use mobile channels to access the internet [2], making mobile devices the most used devices in internet traffic. The virtual campus journey mobile applications have appeared in the market since 2011 [3]. The virtual campus journey apps run on mobile devices, smartwatches, desktop/laptop computers, and tablet devices. Recent developments in software engineering have made it possible for software engineers to design and build apps that can run on different devices and platforms and share the same logic across the devices and platforms. The virtual campus journey apps have become an integral part of the campus population. The users and stakeholders of virtual campus journey applications are staff, 1 Corresponding Author, Bakhtiyor Esanov, School of Engineering Science, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT, Yliopistonkatu 34, 53850, Lappeenranta, Finland; E-mail: bakhtiyor.esanov@student.lut.fi. Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases XXXIII M. Tropmann-Frick et al. (Eds.) © 2021 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/FAIA210494 309