Elearning To Ulearning, Adapting Learning Environments To Mobile Devices

1
Presenter Trent Mifsud

• E-learning To U-learning, Adapting Learning
  Environments To Mobile Devices

2
Introduction

• Problems with students presence on campus
• Enable university content to viewable from mobile
  devices
• How to manage content and design

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Problems

• Multi-tasking and managing time more difficult
  than ever
• Tertiary students are finding it is necessary to
  undertake paid employment to continue with their
  studies
• Attendance at campus lectures and tutorials
  dependent on employment roster requirements
• Students adjust to their employment commitments
  by enrolling in fewer concurrently university
  units
• subsequently prolonging their stay at their
  tertiary institution

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Why

• Financial hardship most significant factor in
  determining whether students discontinued their
  studies (Bennett)
• The format in which tertiary institutions deliver
  their courses is too mechanistic for the
  students changing circumstances

5
Statistics

• Approximately 30,000 Australian undergraduate
  students and found that
• 70 percent were in casual employment, with an
  average work commitment of 14.5 hours per week
  during a semester.
• 33 of full time students and 47 of part time
  students said they missed class frequently or
  sometimes because of work commitments
• (Long and Hayden)

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More Statistics

• American study found a similar pattern 65 of
  their sample of tertiary students were in paid
  employment for between five and sixty hours per
  week
• (Furr and Elling)

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What is Walkabout?

• An Australian slang term for moving around
• Walkabout was developed to address the
  difficulties students face in fixed studying for
  blocks of time in a given place
• hosts five university subjects, all dealing with
  the design and implementation of web sites (three
  at undergraduate and two at masters level)
• Minium of 100 students using the system at any
  given time

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Accessing Walkabout

• Up until recently, access has been via desktop
  browsers only. i.e. Firefox, Opera and IE
• How does this help students who are constantly
  moving around and becoming more nomadic?
• It cannot.

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Walkabout and Ubiquitous Access

• Is possible, but some factors must be considered
• What device or mobile operating system are
  students using?
• What software does it run? Does it have a micro
  web browser?
• We chose Windows Mobile 2003
• Colour, uses Pocket Internet Explorer(PIE),
  supports some javascript

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Mobile Design Aims

• Enable access to Walkabout from a mobile device
• View course materials such as lecture and
  tutorial notes, quizzes
• Enable the streaming of audio which accompanies
  the lecture materials
• Streaming, not downloading
• Mobile devices generally have limited storage

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From Desktop to Mobile Browsers

• Significant differences in capabilities
• Size, Colours, javascript (most), Java Applets
  (none)
• CSS
• One for each target device
• Will require a new CSS for each new device
• Will greatly assist viewing content on mobile
  devices
• Requires some artist design

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Pocket PC and Desktop examples
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Menus
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Media
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Content and Presentation Abstraction

• Do not want to have a copy of the materials
  marked up for each device
• Too time consuming
• One content repository, based in XML
• Edit XML via any text based program
• Apply CSS dynamically
• Allows for future proofing
• Smartphone, 3G (cHTML), xhtml MP

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Walkabout Flow Diagram
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Coming soon - Smartphone

• Why Many students have these already
• Features
• Smaller screens than PPC
• Requires a new CSS
• Has PIE

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Points of Interest

• Ubiquitous access to Walkabout has lead to an
  invitation to all eligible students
  (approximately 14k across Monash University) to
  enroll in the subjects made available for
  Semester 2, 2005
• Numbers are favourable so far (still enrolling)

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Try it yourself

• http//walkabout.netcomp.monash.edu.au
• Guest username and password is located here as
  well

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Conclusion

• We are faced with problems which we cannot
  control students do not regularly attend
  classes
• We have accepted this and allowed more ubiquitous
  access to course materials
• Allows more students to enroll in subjects across
  all of our campuses

21
Thankyou

• Questions?