Johannes Konert

Johannes Konert is professor for Web Engineering at Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin since 2015. Prior to that he studied computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), founded a social media company and became a scholarship as Ph.D. student of the DFG research training group “Feedback-based Quality Management in E-learning” while working as research assistant at Multimedia Communication Lab (KOM) at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. In his Ph.D. thesis he focused on the development of solutions to use social media concepts for knowledge transfer between peers in serious games. During this research, Johannes Konert coined the term social serious games and developed in several research projects prototypes of educational games which are connected to social media applications (like Facebook) in order to allow better assistance and personalization during gameplay. In parallel he was involved in the writing of the successful project proposal for the European Project ALFRED (www.alfred.eu) and was project leader for the German ministry funded project inDAgo (www.indago.de). Both projects are characterized by the use of gamification concepts and serious mini games to enrich elderly peoples everyday life, support their independence, neural abilities training and social interactivity. Currently, his research builds on these outcomes and concentrates on optimization of individual learning experiences in social media-based learning applications. His findings include a significant impact of personality traits for the effectiveness and quality of peer feedback. The expertise in optimizing the peer learning group constellations based on several criteria like participants’ expectations, personality traits, motivation and prior knowledge is expected to be a valuable asset for the project at hand. Johannes Konert developed during a three-year interdisciplinary research project a software plug-in for the learning management system Moodle to support online learning group formation.