Producing educational serious games can be costly and time-consuming. The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach of software development can offer a solution to reduce costs and foment serious games development. In this work, we apply a model called Activity Theory-based Model of Serious Games (ATMSG) for identifying existing relevant components that can be reused for different educational serious games. We apply the derived structure to classify the elements of an existing game and to identify how it can be refactored and expanded following the SOA paradigm.

Several engineering schools offer game based learning either as a supplementary to lecturers or as an integrated part of their curriculum. Most of the games are used in a workshop setting, and much of the learning outcome is achieved through the debriefing part of the workshop, i.e. not as an integrated part of the game. One reason is that many of the games do not offer stealth assessment, and thus need interpretation of a very well skilled facilitator. In additions games only used for one specific course are costly to develop, maintain and improve and in addition facilitated games put limitations on the class size and make it costly to integrate. Thus, this article looks at under which circumstances an on-line game produced for a different course could be integrated in a facilitated and not-facilitated way.

This paper addresses the implications of combining learning analytics and serious games for improving game quality, monitoring and assessment of player behavior, gaming performance, game progression, learning goals achievement, and user's appreciation. We introduce two modes of serious games analytics: in-game (real time) analytics, and post-game (off-line) analytics. We also explain the GLEANER framework for in-game analytics and describe a practical example for off-line analytics. We conclude with a brief outlook on future work, highlighting opportunities and challenges towards a solid uptake of SGs in authentic educational and training settings.

To compete and to thrive in the current global markets it is imperative for the regional businesses to form sustainable collaborative networks. Further, virtual inter-organisational collaboration not only requires changes in the organisational structure but also the increase the dependence on readily available information. The efficiency and effectiveness of this information depends on suitable collaboration tools; especially on the ICT infrastructure as well a trust and cultural understanding between collaborating partners. Especially for SMEs the ability for efficient networked collaboration is of key importance. At the moment, there are no affordable and customizable ERP tools for such a networked collaboration among SMEs, This article presents a research approach focusing on the relevant challenges for the development and introduction of a collaboration tool based upon open source capabilities with industry specific ERP functionalities. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.