The Trial-3 course was grounded in the social constructivist learning theories and in the pedagogical frameworks developed in WP1, focusing on the competence advancement of self-directing learning, social networking, and cross-cultural collaboration through individual as well as group work activities.

Enhancing reflective thinking was one of the main focuses of the Trial-3 course. Student participants were required to read as well as reflect on the assigned reading material about the theoretical aspects of e-learning. Furthermore, every week individual students were asked to reflect on their learning process by filling in the reflection template with 5 questions. The purpose of these reflective activities was to help the students: (i) develop deeper knowledge and skills with regard to the theoretical material; (ii) advance their metacognitive skills and understanding of their learning habits as well as preferences. Besides, conversational learning contracts were adopted to foster students’ self-directing learning competence. They were asked to fill in the contract template with their goals, strategies, tools/resources and evaluation criteria. At the end of the course, the students took a critical look at their contracts and reflected on their achievements accordingly. This self-reflection activity and conversations with the facilitator provided the students some insight of their learning progress and served as a base for self-assessment.

In the Trial-3 course a special focus was on cross-cultural collaboration, which was practiced through group work on designing and developing an artefact – a prototype of e-learning course. In addition to the coordination and regulation regarding the artefact design, the students had to coordinate and regulate their conversational activities within the group and find most suitable tools for mediating these activities in distance. Students of this course were given some flexibility and freedom starting with the choices of reading material and ending up with the personal selection of tools and services for supporting their study activities. However, the course was carried out in combination with the learning management system Moodle and various social media tools/services proposed by the iCamp team and also the tools/services chosen by the students. This made the transformation process from closed institutionalized learning systems to distributed personal environments easier.