Developing recommendations for designing smart and ubiquitous learning environments to be used at outdoors cultural heritage

Cultural heritage carries the historical values from the past, cultural heritage therefore, reflects the identity of societies. Thus, it is important to support people learn from these sites, which could be achieved by introducing new tools to assist in this aspect. Designing such tools could be challenging, as they need to enhance visitors’ engagement as well as enable them to explore sites smartly to well-invested their time with the rapid pace of life. This paper presents the development of recommendations for designing smart and ubiquitous learning environments for outdoor cultural heritage. A novel list of design recommendations is introduced as a result, which was shaped throughout a research project carried out to develop a theoretical framework for designing such services, FoSLE. A user-centred design approach was used in this research adopting the socio-cognitive engineering methodology. Three field studies were conducted to gather user requirements, which led to introduce the FoSLE framework. A set of general requirements was devised from the framework to guide the design of a proof-of-concept smart and ubiquitous learning environment, SmartC. SmartC was evaluated in the field by potential end-users in terms of usability, usefulness and acceptance; suitability for learning was also investigated. The results enabled us to draw the list of design recommendations presented in this paper. This list consists of three parts: content provision, learning experience design and interaction with context design.