Procedia Computer Science 34 ( 2014 ) 583 – 586

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

1877-0509 © 2014 Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Conference Program Chairsdoi: 10.1016/j.procs.2014.07.076

ScienceDirect

International Symposium on Emerging Inter-networks, Communication and Mobility (EICM)

TELEMODE – A proposal towards Technology Enhanced Learning, Engineered with MObile DEvices

Vijayarengan Ramanuja Chary* Miami University, 501 E. High Street, Oxford, Ohio 45056, Unites States of America

Abstract

Today, mobile devices are widely used than ever before for communication, education, entertainment, research collaboration and social interaction. Schools, higher educational institutions and companies are constantly evolving in offering innovative educational services to its users. Mobile devices are overtaking the old fashioned desktop computers by providing flexible and easy access to information independent of time and place. The learning world has been using mobile devices intensively for quite some time for various day-to-day activities. Developers, instructional designers and instructors are still tied to the old world of desktop computers for software and application development. At present, designing applications for mobile application involves the developers and designers use desktop/laptop computers. Then they run emulation software to detect their code's behavior in small screens. The proposed research aims to investigate the various methodologies and framework that can be incorporated in the mobile devices empowering the device to perform as an effective development environment. The future developers/ instructors will have the freedom to use their mobile device as developmental platform allowing them to develop learning materials from anywhere, anyplace, anytime. The main area of focus would be in developing a framework that will allow non-programmers (like instructors) to develop their learning contents using their mobile devices. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the Program Chairs of FNC-2014.

Keywords: Mobile devises as development environment, mobile development platform

1. Introduction

Here Smaller and powerful devices like smartphones and tablets have impacted the way we handle and interact with computers applications, like touching and sliding, dragging and dropping of non physical objects on a screen has become a common practice [1]. In the context of technology enhanced learning, Universities and other educational institutions are offering their educational services via mobile wireless technology so that users can access information independent of place. Mobile learning (M-learning) has received a lot of attention in recent years

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-513-529-5360.

E-mail address: ramanuv@miamioh.edu

© 2014 Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Conference Program Chairs

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as a growing segment of the educational and instructional technology field [2]. These emerging learning habits have helped the students as well as working professionals to participate in education from anywhere using their mobile device with Internet capability. In 2014, access to the Internet through mobile devices will overtake access from the desktop computers [3]. The proposed framework will have its concentration towards effective usage of mobile device as a developmental tool to develop learning materials. The effective usage is attributed after an in depth investigation into various programming paradigm [4] and frameworks that allows mobile devices as developmental platform. The end product of the research would be a user friendly, effective system that will let designers/instructors to develop learning materials using their mobile devices.

2. Motivation

In the perspective of hardware performance, what we proudly owned as desktop computer few years ago is today's smart phone/mobile device that is carried along everywhere in our pocket. By 2015, it is estimated that, cellphones will be used by 80% of people for accessing the Internet [5]. Alden [6] expects that mobile services and applications will have a significant impact on future education. Mobile device as a platform for developing contents, the technology shift yet to take its full form, is relatively very new or still just on paper and inks. In 2012, the technology in undergoing another shift, using mobile devices for most computing tasks [7]. In the mobile era it is important that the instructional designers and instructors take advantage of the technological shift by adopting mobile devices as content development environment.

3. Literature review

Mobile devices had infiltrated deep in every part of our lives, communication, business, education, entertainment and so on. It was estimated that in 2012, number of smart phones and tablets sold will be higher than number of desktops, laptops and netbooks combined [7]. Higher education institutions and other education sectors have taken initiatives in offering their services via mobile devices due to its flexibility of learning anywhere, anytime. Student's transition to the new learning methodology using mobile devices has been smooth, as they have been growing up with mobile phones throughout their life [8]. The wider use of mobile devices had sparked interest in integrating new technologies to co-exist in the classroom experiences and providing educational service using mobile technologies allows access to information and learning materials from anywhere [2], even far way from their formal study place.

4. Similar work and significance

Mobile devices are becoming more powerful everyday; hence using them as development platform isn’t too far. Mobile device for writing programs has its limitation like screen size, keying in using smaller soft keyboards (not considering external keyboard) as implied by [9]. Their research on this topic involved using TouchDevelop IDE and TouchDevelop programming language. The codes are typed using the soft keys of mobile devices (tablets/touch screen smart phones). The cloud services used to publish the completed work. Another significant work on programming using mobiles used concatenative programming language [1]. Programming large-scale applications using these limited capability of mobile devices has become unrealistic.

Ease (from anyplace) of use the mobile devices have gained its position as learning environment among students. The mobile application developed for mobile devices are small and lite and hence can easily be designed using mobile devices. Testing the end product of a mobile applications using emulator is difficult [7]. Designing on a small screen gives the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) feel that the end users see. The proposed research is for defining a framework that will allow instructors to use their mobile devices for developing learning materials. The proposed framework can be implemented to allow non programmers like instructors (or Subject Matter Experts) who are mostly non-programmers will be able to design their own course contents. Most of the existing framework/application enables users to write software programs using mobile devices, the proposed framework will allow course materials to be designed even by users without need for any programming skills. The outcome of the

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research will be a framework that can be used for designing learning materials for programmers (writing codes) as well as for non-programmers.

5. Research Plan

The technology shift, mobile devices as programming environment for certain applications development has already begun, soon more complicated approaches are likely to be eventually replaced by single-device approach and making PC development environment obsolete [7]. The research would propose an effective programming framework that is capable of powering the mobile devices to perform as a developmental platform. The new mobile framework is concentrating on enhancing learning experience and hence the key criteria that the research would address are specific to enhancing learning experiences like (a) Ease of use, (b) Support of mobile platforms (Android, Apple iOS, Windows, BlackBerry, Symbian etc) and (c) Functionality. The below sections explain in detail about each specific criterion.

5.1. Ease of use

In this research our context on ease of use of mobile devices refers to the text inputting( writing code) capability and/or drag and drop facilities. The framework for mobile development could involve using custom programming language [9] or using concatenative programming [1], which has a strong focus on composing words out of other words. That is concise programming commands are entered manually via soft keyboards. Making the programing syntax smaller reduces the number of keys typed in. This is one of the approach that reduces the time and effort in coding programs. Cancatenative programming language like Factor (presently Jfactor) used by [1] compares the code to regular Java code that shows reduced overhead of typing. Another approach by App.cat [10], iUI [11] and Sencha Touch [12] uses application framework that involves drag and drop features.

5.2. Support of mobile platforms

The application developed from the proposed framework must be capable of running in most of the widely used mobile Operating Systems (OS). Ribeiro and da Silva [13] suggests that the problem of developing application(s) for multiple operating system can be overcome by using tools/frameworks that support cross platform compatibility. The framework should have the capability of publishing a mobile application and almost every OS should be able to run them without any modification.

5.3. Functionality

The proposed framework is expected to support easy embedding of text, images, animations, interactive fields (tests and quizzes), audio, and video. These are the features that would enable users to have better learning experience. The framework needs to support cloud connections, database connections and designing web services, for future enhancements of the application to support inter system communication. For example the learning system can push grades (secured in test and quizzes of a particular course) to student information system.

6. Future Work

The three criteria will be analysed and investigated thoroughly. The outcomes of the investigation would lead to a set of possible and crucial implementations that the framework needs to support. The framework could be implemented as tool designed as an Integrated Developmental Environment (IDE) for developing learning materials. Furthermore, the implementation could be used to connect with other information systems to design as a full-fledged M-Learning application. For example, students using the M-learning application can read course contents, take assessments, view their enrolment status, assignment and assessment statuses, grades etc. The outcome is not just for educational institutions but could also be implemented to support health professional able to access securely the patient details or agricultural analyst able to access wetness, temp, wind or forecast information.

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7. Conclusion

Mobile devices will eventually replace desktop computers in every part of the life. Developers can take advantage of the powerful mobile devices as their programming platform. Today’s mobile devices are equipped with powerful hardware that is capable of handling the load that the programmers throw into them. Bringing this research live, to the least, bring dramatic change on how programmers/instructional designers access and create course contents. For example, an instructor during a conference break would be able to use the mobile device to create/modify a tutorial for the next lab session that the instructor found interesting from the session that was presented few minutes ago. Creating/modifying the tutorial, communicating with the web application to update the learning management system is all accomplished using the mobile device from any part of the world. The convenience of accessing the learning materials anywhere is a great option but the real potential of mobile devices as programming environment is awaiting a burst.

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