MSc dissertation

1
MSc dissertation

• Academic Mobility An investigation of mobile
  opportunities in higher education
• A desk research and evaluative study
• Stefanos Evangelou
• Msc Web Technology
• se4v07_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
• http//users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/se4v07/dissertation/i
  ndex.html

2
Agenda

• Introduction
• Theoretical background
• Case studies
• Survey results
• Evaluation of services at the University of
  Southampton
• Proposing a mobile strategy for the University of
  Southampton
• LBS demos walkthrough
• Conclusions and suggestions for further research
• Bibliography

3
Introduction

• Motivation
• Investigate mobile opportunities in higher
  education
• Tasks Methodology
• Case studies review
• Surveys
• Evaluation of current services
• Strategic proposals
• Demo LBS services
• Relevant work

4
Theoretical background

• Definitions of mobility in the context of
  education
• Mobile services industry
• Mobile production chain
• Stakeholders (W3C, mTLD)
• Application areas in higher education
• M-learning
• Academic administration services
• Location-based services

5
Case studies

• M-learning
• Eastern Asia
• North America
• Europe/UK
• University of Southampton (mPLAT et al)
• Special cases of m-learning (placement learning)
• Academic administration services
• Location-based services

6
Survey results

• Online survey to students
• Sent to124 students
• 43 active participants
• Schools of ECS, Management, Education
• Email survey to academics and members of staff
• ISS, LATEU, LTN, ECS
• Findings

7
Assessment of mobile services

• Four most popular services
• SUSSED portal
• Outlook Webmail
• ECS Intranet
• University of Southampton main website
• Online mobile checkers
• MobileOK (W3C)
• Ready.mobi (mTLD)
• Final evaluation matrices

8
Proposing a mobile strategy

• Proposing a two-phase plan
• Phase 1 Improve current services and design new
  ones
• Phase 2 Test and deploy new services
• Mobile 2.0 Web-based services vs. Native apps
• LBS based on Google APIs
• Google Maps next-lecture application
• Develop scripts to overcome iPhone
  incompatibilities and use GPS
• Google Mapplet next-lecture application
• Google Feeds personalised RSS feed reader?

9
Conclusions and future work

• Mobile services hold great potential
• However m-learning practices to be defined
  alongside e-learning
• Current implementations are limited
• Administrative SMS-based services
• Small-scale m-learning case-studies
• Novel Mobile Web-based apps from US Universities
• University of Southampton could lead innovation
  in this area

10
Bibliography

• My reviewed bibliography consists of
• Books / whitepapers on Mobile Web development
• Academic papers on m-learning and LBS
• Case studies in higher education