Application of a Mobile Personal Learning Environment to a Computer Science subject Miguel Á. Conde Department of Mechanical, Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering. GRIAL Research Group. University of León, León, Spain. miguel.conde@unileon.es Francisco J. García-Peñalvo Computer Science Department. Science Education Research Institute (IUCE). GRIAL Research Group. University of Salamanca. Salamanca, Spain. fgarcia@usal.es Abstract—The Internet, the 2.0 trends and the mobile technologies are changing the tools that lot of people use in their daily life. Teaching and learning process are also affected. These technologies emphasize the fact that learning is not always linked to an institution or a period of time. However institutional learning systems do not support this concept and this makes necessary the definition of Personal Learning Environments. These new learning environments do not to replace the traditional ones so the coexistence is necessary. This paper describes the experience of the application of one of those personal environments implemented for mobile devices that is able to exchange information with the institutional systems. From this experience it is possible to say the definition of mobile Personal Learning Environments is possible, it increases learners’ motivation and enriches their learning; and at the same time it is possible to take into account what the learners do beyond the institution. Keywords—PLE, LMS, mobile, interoperability, motivation. I. INTRODUCTION The emergence of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and especially the affordances of the Internet, 2.0 trends and mobile devices facilitate a new wide range of applications and tools that can be used to carry out learning activities. Clear examples of how the ICT has been applied to learning processes are the Learning Management Systems (LMS). LMSs are one of the most representative eLearning solutions, something shown by the fact that are widely accepted and used in different academic and workplace contexts [1, 2]. The use of an LMS provides students and teachers with a set of tools for improving learning processes and managing them. Despite this high level of adoption, they have not resulted in the educational improvements, which might have been expected. Three principal reasons have been offered for this: 1) The tools provided are not used properly and often are used as mere spaces to publish courses [3, 4]; 2) LMSs restrict opportunities for collaboration in student learning and for the promotion of social constructivism which is not limited to a period of time (i.e. academic year) [5, 6]; and 3) They are focused on the course and the institution rather than the student and their needs [7]. Other kind of educational learning systems are needed. They should consider: 1) which the specific necessities of each learner are; 2) the tools that they really use to learn; and 3) they do not only learn into the institution or linked to a specific period of time. In order to address these, among other issues, the Personal Learning Environments (PLE) are defined. PLEs facilitate the user learning process by allowing them to use the tools they want to use and not joining them to a specific institutional context or learning period [8]. LMSs and PLEs should coexist and exchange information between them, because they are supporting to different concepts, it is necessary to exchange information and interaction in order that the institutional learning can be more adapted to user necessities and be enriched with new functionalities; and that the learning that happens outside those kind of contexts can be taken into account [9]. In order to do so, a service-based framework has been defined and it has been applied in different educational contexts [10-12]. From these experiences, it has been possible to see that students do not only use different tools from the provided by the institution to learn, but also other devices beyond the web browser. In particular, it was found that for students, one of the most appealing contexts for students is the mobile device. This is one of the most popular technologies. In fact, there is an estimation 96.2% of this technology penetration and more than 6,800 million of mobile devices connections, which means that most of first world population use one or more mobile devices and they are increasingly widespread in the developing countries [13]. Moreover the mobile broadband and the use of smartphones are making possible a set of comprehensive services to be exploited. Taking into account such high uptake, those services and the necessity to consider personal environments, the next step is to represent PLE in a mobile device, which is called mobile PLE (mPLE). This mobile PLE should allow students define their own learning environments, by choosing the tools they want to use to learn. It might include institutional functionalities from the LMS, learning tools and other tools not defined initially with educational proposes. During this paper it is defined how the mPLE is applied to the students of a Software Engineering subject in the University of Salamanca. The paper is structured as follows. In the second section some related works are summarized. Later (in the third section)