Technical and design issues in implementation

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Technical and design issues in implementation

• Dr. Mohamed Ally
• Director and Professor
• Centre for Distance Education
• Athabasca University
• Canada
• New Zealand Presentation
• January 2010

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Examples of Educational Activities using Mobile
Technology

• Make a concept map summarizing a chapter
• Keep track of class schedules, assignments, and
  grades
• Increase content accessibility for those with
  disabilities
• Use a tutorial for self-study
• Take part in a collaborative simulation
• Do research on the web
• Participate in a collaborative project
• Track a community service learning project

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How mobile technology help in Education

• Education is more than one way delivery of
  information
• Interactive
• Support
• Practice
• Practical application
• Build learning communities

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Interactivity in Learning

• Object interactivity (proactive inquiry) -
  objects (buttons, people, things) are activated
  by using a keypad or other pointing device.
• Linear interactivity (reactive pacing) - the user
  is able to move (forwards or backwards) through a
  predetermined linear sequence.
• Support interactivity (reactive inquiry) -
  generalized and context-sensitive support (help
  messages and tutorial supports).

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Interactivity (contd)

• Update Interactivity - individual application
  components or events in which a dialogue is
  initiated between the learner and
  mobile-generated content (practice with feedback)
• Construct Interactivity - the creation of an
  instructional environment in which the learner is
  required to manipulate component objects to
  achieve specific goals (assemble an apparatus).
• Reflective Interactivity - text responses to
  prompts or questions where learners can reflect
  on their response and make their own judgment as
  to its accuracy or correctness.

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Interactivity (contd)

• Simulation Interactivity - extends the role of
  the learner to that of controller or operator,
  where individual selections determine the
  learning sequence.
• Hyperlinked Interactivity (proactive navigation)
  - the learner has access to a wealth of
  information, and may "travel" at will through
  that knowledge base.

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Interactivity (contd)

• Non-Immersive Contextual Interactivity - extends
  the various interactive levels into a complete
  virtual learning environment (mutual elaboration)
  in which the learner is able to work in a
  meaningful, job-related context.
• Immersive Virtual Interactivity - provides an
  interactive environment in which the learner is
  projected into a complete mobile-generated world
  which responds to individual movement and
  actions.

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Why Mobile Learning at Athabasca University

• Course material accessible on mobile devices.
• Need to find out if this was meeting student
  requirements.
• The purpose of this study was to determine the
  devices being used by students, their experience
  with course materials access, and how useful they
  thought using mobile devices to access course
  materials was.

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Delivering to Specific Devices

• Device detection had been problematic because new
  devices and mobile OSs and browsers were
  constantly coming on stream.
• Created problems for the device detection scheme
  used to determine the mobile device
• String user_agent request.getHeader("user-agent"
  )
• Changed to JavaScript to determine screen real
  estate
• if (screen.width gt 800)
• document.write('ltstyle type\"text/css\"gt..

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Stylesheet Delivery
If screen size lt 800, delivers style sheet meant
for mobile device
If the screen size is gt 800, delivers the full
stylesheet
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Multimedia Displays
Delivery of alternate graphics to mobile devices
Device detection also implemented for applets,
flash, large graphics, etc.
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Research Project Intelligent Agent to Adapt
Course Materials for Mobile Learners
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• In mobile learning students use mobile devices to
  access course materials however, these devices
  operate in different ways and have different
  capabilities
• Need a system to identify the device so course
  material to be delivered in heterogeneous
  computing platforms

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• This project developed an intelligent software
  agent capable of adapting to the heterogeneous
  mobile computing environment.

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Agent Characteristics

• The agent can search for a conversion tool
  according to the desired format and convert the
  course materials automatically.
• The agent is able to understand mobile clients
  capabilities.

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Process

• Jena as an RDF (Resource Description Framework)
  parser was used to obtain the device information,
  providing a query language called Resource
  Description Query Language (RDQL, 2005) to query
  for device information.
• Sun's Wireless Toolkit and PalmOS Emulator were
  used as the testing environment.
• An open and service-oriented architecture was
  used to develop the agent and open application
  interfaces to enable interaction and integration
  seamlessly between learning objects repository,
  course repository, and learning services.

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Design Considerations

• Software Portability. A Java-based
  cross-platform software framework is one of the
  most important features in this project.
• Limited Computing Power and Memory Consumption.
  We designed computing intensive tasks to execute
  on the server side. The portable computing
  devices act as a thin client.
• Display Properties. The system provides support
  for different devices by separating the
  presentation layer from the data content. A
  number of different devices can be supported
  without the need of modifying programming logic
  and data content.

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• Design Flexibility and Scalability. The system
  is designed in a distributed architecture that
  prevents a single point of failure, improves
  structural scalability and performance.
• Caching to Save on Limited Resources. With the
  support of the caching design, users can read the
  cached course notes on the device to avoid
  additional downloads.
• Software Agent Support. Software agents can be
  used to facilitate automated routine tasks,
  residing in both the client device and the server
  environment.

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The overall architectural diagram
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Activity Diagram Client Server Negotiation
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Questions for the Component Attribute Criteria
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Steps in the Device Recognition

• The server agent will try to recognize the device
  by its vendor and device names. If the server
  agent cannot find that device directly from the
  database, it will try to recognize the device by
  the component attributes.

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What is Next?

• Mobile Libraries
• Mobile social software
• Personal learning spaces
• LMS integration (Moodle)
• Student modeling and adaptive learning

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Conclusion

• Must deliver courses on a variety of technology
• Cater for the younger generations
• Improve access with mobile learning
• Reach out to the indigenous and remote people