Supporting learning self- regulation through a PLE: Dealing with the time management dimension

In the knowledge society, autonomous and Self-Directed Learning (SDL) have become particularly important for professional development and lifelong learning. This kind of learning can take place in physical and virtual spaces that may belong to formal institutions but also to extended communities and networks. In virtual spaces, self-directed learning and self-regulation skills and capacities play an important role in learners' performance. For this reason, it is highly recommended to empower students to design and deploy educational spaces and projects able to fuse formal and informal contexts. The use of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) can support learners to gain control over their experiences through Web-based tools and a task-orientated environment. It is known that time management is one relevant component of self-regulated learning. There are many Web-based tools that can be used to control time investment and promote planning but little research that takes into account time management in the design and use of PLEs. This chapter describes the results of the Just4me project1, aimed at designing and developing a PLE to support self-regulated learning dealing with time management as an important dimension in lifelong learning. From this perspective, this chapter contributes to the operationalization and analysis of the time factor in online learning regarding time management in self-regulated learning processes supported by PLEs.