The need of E-Learning Outcomes of a Partecipatory Process Vincenzo D’Andrea Department of Sociology and Social Research University of Trento Trento, Italy vincenzo.dandrea@unitn.it Abstract —This paper discusses the use of participatory methodologies for designing services to be added to a mobile application supporting students' activities. The work is related to a project for building a city-wide campus in a small city with a rather dynamic university environment located in northern Italy. Since the beginning of the project, users (that is, students) have been involved in designing services and applications for Smart Campus. The participation of the students has been via individual and group interviews (focus group). Students have been involved in designing and testing services and applications. In this work, we tried to increase the level of participation of the users, in the tradition of Participatory Design. This paper describes how the results of PD workshops provided relevant and unexpected outcomes with relatively small effort, providing the design of an application closer to the students’ needs. This work has allowed the emergence of the desire in students to include an e-learning perspective in a single application, in order to formalize and aggregate some community dynamics that already exist. The output of this research has been remarkable by virtue of the strategic choices made in the framework of participatory techniques, the chosen methodologies allowed to work within a short time frame and to transform a potential liability into an asset. Keywords—Partecipatory Design, E-Learning, Mobile Applications I. INTRODUCTION In this paper, we discuss the use of participatory methodologies for designing services to be added to a mobile application supporting students' activities. Our work is connected to an on-going project for building a city-wide campus in Trento, a small city with a rather dynamic university environment located in northern Italy. Similar to other universities in Europe, the university facilities in Trento are scattered in various parts of the town. The overall goal of Smart Campus is to build an integrated set of mobile applications, thus creating a virtual campus. (http://www.smartcampuslab.it/lab/ ) Since the beginning of the project, users (that is, students) have been involved in designing services and applications for Smart Campus. The participation of the students has been via individual and group interviews (focus group). Students have been involved also in coding and testing the applications. In our work, we tried to increase the level of participation of the users, in the tradition of Participatory Design. The first Participatory Design (PD) activities started in Scandinavia in the 70's. [4] The most distinguishing trait of PD is probably the shift of responsibility (and power) from the designers to the users. Although there is no fixed prescription of the amount of “shift”, users are certainly empowered in these approaches while the designers move toward the role of experts facilitating and validating the design processes. [7] In the work presented in this paper, after attending a course on PD, a group of students took on the role of facilitators to a heterogeneous group of (other) students. In the following sections, after providing more details on the context and on the methodologies, we discuss the results of the Participatory Design process. We will describe how the results of PD workshop provided significant (and, to certain extent, unexpected) outcomes with relatively small effort, possibly providing the design of an application closer to the students’ needs. II. THE FRAME OF REFERENCE A. Smart Campus project “Smart Campus is a lab and a community. The lab builds a social and technical environment for collaborative service design. The community is composed of all students, Angela Di Fiore, Julien Lebeny Fanseu Chinkou, Francesca Fiore Department of Sociology and Social Research University of Trento Trento, Italy Fig. 1. Smart campus logo