Context and the Virtual Campus: Collaboration in Tertiary Education

There has been highly dynamic change in the socio-economic, demographic, and employment conditions experienced by all stakeholders in tertiary education. Concomitant with this change is the developing capability and ubiquity of mobile communications with data storage and processing technologies. The societal change has driven the evolution in pedagogic systems and the technological change has provided the basis upon which such pedagogic systems can be realized and implemented. This paper considers tertiary education, the virtual campus, and virtual learning environments. Collaborative interactions are addressed in P2P (including person-to-machine-to-person) (PPI) interactions realized in pedagogic systems and social networking along with an overview of context. Technology and virtual education is addressed with a discussion around on-demand learning anytime-anywhere, context sensing, and learning within the "Cloud-of-Things". The paper concludes with a discussion and conclusions.