# Introducing Personal Teaching Environment for Nontraditional Teaching Methods
## 1 Introduction
It contains: (i) a set of tools that can be personalized according to the instructor's needs; (ii) data sources that can be used in material preparation or assessing students; and (iii) connections and activities that each instructor may use to teach. However, the requirements and goals of students and teachers who use these kinds of environments are different. PTEs are designed to meet the demands of teachers by allowing them to connect with students' PLEs, but also enabling teachers to analyze, guide, and also assist them in preparing and delivering their tasks. A PTE aims to assist instructors in having control of and managing their own teaching. This involves assisting individual instructors in setting their own teaching goals, managing their teaching methods and resources, and connecting with other teachers for sharing their teaching experiences. Furthermore, teachers may also use PTEs involving the use of specific tools to facilitate the completion of their tasks while using traditional or nontraditional teaching methods (e.g., flipped learning and problem-based learning) and for their professional development. Traditional teaching methods are based on explaining a topic in a textbook, note-taking, lectures, or onboarding; the learner is not an active participant [12]. Nontraditional teaching methods usually involve encouraging students to participate in class activities, triggering their curiosity and creativity, and enhancing communication with others [13; 14; 15]. Effort is spent providing teaching methods that can be used with different types of students, as it is impossible to find one method that is fully compatible with all students' different abilities and skills [14; 16]. Teachers usually include one or more teaching methods in their teaching activities. That raises one important question with the current information and communication technologies (ICTs): How does one give guidance to teachers and facilitate the creation of teaching activities in different nontraditional teaching methods? We propose the Personal Teaching Environment (PTE) as a solution to facilitate the involvement of the teacher in this kind of teaching method. The goal of this paper is to introduce the concept of PTE and provide PTE application examples while using nontraditional teaching methods. In this study, we intensified our efforts to illustrate some commonly used types of nontraditional teaching methods. We also focused on stating the activities, tool types, advantages, frameworks, processes, and successful implementation stories of the selected methods. Moreover, we provide tool types and application examples of PTEs enabling the development of some nontraditional teaching methods. The results of this study can assist instructors with selecting the teaching methods and the tools that could most effectively meet the learning objectives of their courses. To attain the goals of this study, the authors analyzed 93 peer-reviewed articles to find the answers to the following questions:  
1. What is the structure of a PTE and how does it work? 2. What are nontraditional teaching methods' advantages, frameworks, and successful implementation stories? 3. How would you categorize the tool types of nontraditional teaching methods to serve PTE applications? The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section describes the PTE concept and its structure. Section 3 describes the most popular nontraditional teaching methods. Section 4 illustrates the methodology used to achieve the objectives of this study. Section 5 addresses advantages, tool types, tools used, frameworks, and successful implementation stories of the considered nontraditional teaching methods. Section 6 describes the examples of PTEs while using the selected methods. Section 7 illustrates the work's limitations, conclusions, and future work.