The need of e-learning: Outcomes of a partecipatory process

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.