Learning from Learning Objects and Their Repositories to Create Sustainable Educational App Environments

The last years have seen an increased usage of apps, applications that are downloaded from a centralized repository and run in a particular environment. However, smaller app environments face the major challenge of attracting sufficient awareness and usage by third-party developers and users to become sustainable. This is a typical chicken-and-egg problem. Without apps, few people will be using the environment. Few users lead to limited incentive for app developers. We analyze work done in a very similar domain, namely learning object repositories (LORs), to learn about factors that inhibit participation in app environments. We also present an approach to overcome these problems, which aims at lowering the barriers of participation for app production as much as possible. The framework was partly implemented and is being applied at a higher education institution, where teachers and teaching assistants created over a hundred of apps.