Our recently revamped ILIAS ‘Lernorte’ (Learnplaces) can be used anywhere where mobile access to location-based information is required. In practical terms, this means that e.g. an educational escape game or a self-guided tour can be implemented, in which learners use a progressive web app (PWA) in the browser of their own mobile device to navigate to predefined coordinates outdoors or scan QR codes attached indoors to unlock the information or materials stored at a Learnplace.

Note: as not all control panels for the language variable have been translated into English yet, screenshots from the German version are used in this article. In places where a mix of languages occurs, we mention both labels in this text to prevent confusion.

You can try out the learning locations directly on a tour through the Botanical Garden Freiburg. The link leads to the course in which the learnplaces were created.

• After you have joined, open learnplaces.uni-freiburg.de on your mobile device (or in a new browser window/tab), log in with your university account and allow access to your location**.
• In the blue footer of the following welcome screen, tap (or click) on ‘Lernorte’ to access your personal overview (Übersicht, fig. 2 left). Here you will find your course ‘Lernorte im Botanischen Garten’ and a list of the stations on this tour below it.
• Select one of the stations to view the stored information (fig. 2 centre). Under ‘Map’ (in the footer), the location of the Learnplace is displayed as a point within a radius on a map (fig. 2 right). Use the ‘Eigene Position anzeigen’ button to display your own position on the map to help you find the learnplace.
• As soon as your radius (not shown here) overlaps the one of the Learnplace, return to the information page and reload it if necessary to see whether further materials has now been unlocked for you (in this case, an explanatory text and a video). The arrow to the right in the footer takes you back to the overview.
• The Learnplace you have already visited is now marked with a tick (not shown here) and you can move on to the next one.

** In principle, it is possible to use the Learnplaces app without access to your own location, but this may lead to restrictions depending on the configuration of the Learnplaces (by the person who created them). In the example shown here, without the signal that the visitor is within the radius of the Learnplace, the additional explanatory materials would not be unlocked and the Learnplaces would not be marked as visited.

If the tour takes you to very remote or heavily shielded locations, i.e. if dead spots are to be expected (or if you simply want to save data volume), it is also possible to use the app in offline mode (with GPS only). To do this, the materials can be downloaded in advance at the bottom of each single Learnplace pages before starting the tour.

• In your own course, add a new object called ‘Learnplace’ (Lernort), give it a title (and a description if necessary) and save it (fig. 3 steps 1 and 2). (The bug in the label will of course be corrected :) )
• The new learning location now appears in the list on the course page  (fig. 3 step 3), but as long as it is offline, it will not be visible in the app. To configure it, click on the title.
• The basic configuration is done via the ‘Settings’ (Einstellungen) tab (fig. 4): here you can switch the Learnplace online (and thus make it available in the app) and specify under which conditions/ when it should be visible to learners there.
• Visibility: All examples of the tour in the botanical garden are configured to be ‘always visible’, whereas for an escape game, the most restrictive setting, ‘visible at place’, offers the possibility of increasing the level of difficulty by making learning locations only temporarily visible (in order to find them at all, they must of course be placed within the radius of another visible learning location or, alternatively, the GPS data must be specified elsewhere, etc.). ‘visible after visit’ is selected if learners are to visit the learning location (or scan a QR code) in order to have the materials permanently unlocked from that visit onwards. ‘Never visible’ makes sense e.g. if the learning location has already been put online, but you have not yet finished editing it.
• ‘Suchwörter’ (search terms) correspond to the ‘tags’ in the app and can be freely created and added to the Learnplace. Just note them in the corresponding field comma-separated. Tags can be useful for filtering, especially when there are a large number of learning locations (also see the announcement of upcoming features at the bottom :) ).
• Under ‘Location’ (Position), enter the position of the Learnplace (alternatively, click directly on the map) and set the radius to be displayed (in the example of the botanical garden tour, this is 50 m throughout). The zoom level determines how far zoomed in the learning location should appear when the map is called up. Don't forget to save in the end.

At the very bottom of the ‘Settings’ page (not shown in the image), a QR code for the Learnplace, that can be scanned via the app is automatically created and made available for download. This makes little sense in outdoor locations that can be easily identified by GPS data, but might e.g. provide disabled persons with an alternative QR check-in access to the stored information. However, QR check-in is mainly intended for learning locations that are very close to each other indoors (pictures in a museum, equipment in a laboratory etc.)

• To fill the Learnplaces with information, go to the ‘Content’ (Inhalt) tab. Clicking on the plus sign in a grey field (fig. 5 step 1) takes you to a selection of different options, which will later be displayed on the page in the app (text, picture, video, ILIAS link, accordion as a design element).
• Fig. 5 step 3 shows the configuration page for ‘Picture’ (Bild). A file can be uploaded at the bottom, the title and description are optional (if you enter something here, a blue box will be added below the image in the app, displaying both). All configuration pages for the respective addable material blocks also have the configuration option ‘Visibility’ (Sichtbarkeit). This allows you to make finer adjustments (e.g. the Learnplace has the setting ‘always visible’, but a video in it is ‘visible at place’. Please note: the reverse does not work; a ‘never visible’ learning location also hides an ‘always visible’ video located in it). Save (and repeat these two steps for additional blocks if necessary).

To present the learning locations in a more attractive way in the ILIAS course (rather than as a simple list), you can add preview maps to the course (fig. 6). To do this, open the page editor using the ‘Edit page’ button, click on a + and select ‘Insert Learnplaces Map’ (Lernorte Karte einfügen). Then select the desired map mode (Karten-Typ):

• ’Sammlung" (collection) is the total amount of all Learnplaces created in a course. The Learnplaces are not numbered on the map, but are displayed according to their assigned tags.
  Configuration: If the Sammlung mode is selected, the grey field of the learning location plugin appears, which must first be clicked on to edit. An empty map then appears, with a list of the Learnplaces tags below it (fig. 7 step 1). You can now use the tags to set which Learnplaces will be displayed on the map. To do this, click on the down arrow below ‘Actions’ and select ‘Edit’. A pop-up window will open where you can activate the tag (tick "Aktiv") and assign a colour to it (fig. 7 step 2). After confirming the colour with OK and saving the settings in the pop-up window, the assigned learning locations will appear on the map and the tag will be marked with a tick under ‘Aktiv’. In case a Learnplage has several tags, their colours will be displayed as rings. Learning locations with a white tick in the innermost circle are the ones you already visited (fig 7 step 3). Learners can now see the map on the course page and, by clicking on ‘Show Learnplaces’ (Lernorte anzeigen), display the Learnplaces in a pop-up window, sorted by tags.
• "Tour" is a subset of Learnplaces selected from a collection. The Learnplaces are numbered on the map, visualising the suggested order of the stations.
  Configuration: the first step is the same as for the collection map. A table appears, initially consisting only of headings, which you can now fill in by clicking on ‘Add Learnplace’ (Lernort hinzufügen) (fig. 8 step 1). Once the first Learnplace has been entered, a map appears, similar to the view for the collection (fig. 8 step 3, shown zoomed in). If you want to change the order of the tour stations again, you can do so later using the ‘Position’ field. In this map mode, Learnplaces that have already been visited are also marked with a green tick above the marker (shown in fig. 8 above Learnplace no. 4).

Due to current (26 February 2026) fixes of remaining bugs, the implementation of the Learnplaces on ILIAS and in the app currently differ slightly, with the app being at a slightly older (but stable) version. This means that the app does not yet include the overview maps already available on ILIAS and shown here, nor the differentiation between collection and tour. There may therefore be deviations from what is shown here in the meantime, and we will of course update this page as soon as possible once the new functions are also active in the app.