The Design and Implementation of an Interactive Mobile Learning System

Hongru Qi E-learning Lab, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, P.R. China

readingqhr@sjtu.edu.cn

Minjuan Wang Educational Technology, San Diego State University, USA

mwang@mail.sdsu.edu

Ren Tong, Ruimin Shen, Jiajun Wang, Yi Gao E-learning Lab, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, P.R. China

{ tongren, rmshen, jjwang, ygao}@sjtu.edu.cn

Abstract

With the fast development of mobile computing terminals and wireless network, Mobile Learning (ML) is becoming one of the most popular research and development areas in todays E-Learning. Through convenient and flexible mobile terminals and network, researchers and developers strive to provide users with teaching and learning resources and services that can be accessible anytime anywhere. This paper describes the design and implementation of a mobile learning system that can deliver live broadcast of real-time classroom teaching to online students with mobile devices. The system allows students to customize their ways of receiving, based on when and where they are tuning into the broadcast. To increase interactivity between the instructor and online students in large classes, the system also supports short text-messaging and instant polls. Through these venues, students can ask questions and make suggestions in real time, and the instructor can address them immediately.

1. Introduction

Mobile learning (mLearning), defined as learning with mobile devices such as Palms, PocketPc, Wireless Cameras, Web Tablets, Cell phones, and any other handheld devices [1] [2] [3], has drawn a great deal of attention in the U.S., and in European and Asian countries. Mobile Learning is the marriage between mobile computing and E-Learning [4]. Todays mobile terminals have strong computing capabilities with high frequency CPU. They can put convenient multimedia

service applications into practice with friendly human computer interfaces and operation modes; and they can also access abundant network resources through a variety of network connection techniques. In the meantime, computing networks are developing at an astonishing speed as well. In particular, the rapid development of wireless networks transforms cell phones, Pocket PCs, iPods and other PDAs into learning devices. Apart from Bluetooth and WiFi, GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) is one of the primary ways to transfer network data to these mobile terminals. As long as the users cell phones are situated on a signal location, they can enjoy various network resources and services via GPRS. All these make it easier for users to access learning anytime anywhere. Because of the fast development of Mobile Learning, distance education has begun to challenge formal schooling and traditional classroom teaching. We need to reconsider the autonomy of the physical classrooms in adult education, although distance education has yet to bridge a gulf between formal and experiential learning [5].

Up to now, a great deal of creative work has been done in developing mobile learning systems and classrooms. For instance, National Central University in Taiwan built a Wireless Technology Enhanced Classroom [6]. This classroom supports everyday activities unobtrusively and seamlessly in classroom contexts through the integration of a number of devices, such as the wireless LAN, wireless mobile learning devices and an electronic whiteboard. All these enable teachers and students to engage more fully in the process of learning through more frequent interaction and collaboration. In Europe, the large-

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'06) 0-7695-2632-2/06 $20.00 2006 IEEE

scale Mobilearn project (www.mobilearn.org) explores the potential and the architecture of mobile learning through its application in health, museum, and executive education. As part of this project, a group of researchers from Switzerland designed a MobileGame prototype [7], which orients new students to theuniversity and its surroundings in a fun and engaging way. Since learning is considered a life-long activity, researchers from University of Birmingham also developed an exemplar of a personal mobile system to assist people of all ages in their personal learning throughout their lives [8]. This prototype testing followed the daily activities of children, related those activities to online resources, organized them into visual maps, and also shared the activities with others through a handheld learning device/resource. Their proof-of-concept testing confirmed that a handheld device -- with appropriate learning tools and resources, an intuitive interface, and high-speed communication -- could effectively help people manage their lives and learn as they live. However, the components of an intuitive interface and high-speed communication are still compromised by todays technology. In addition, mobile learning faces the great challenge of creating the concrete context for learning, which involves the familiar dimensions of time and location, . . . the learners goals and motivation, the surrounding resources, co-learners, and other available conversants[8].

Aiming to create a real context for mobile learning, the E-learning Lab of Shanghai Jiao Tong University designed and implemented a mobile learning system that supports multi-directional communications among instructors and students. This system also intends to solve the problem of time delay in mobile communication, the delay between the live class lectures or activities and the broadcast onto students cell phones or any other portable devices. Sections 2 and 3 of this paper concisely describe the function and the architecture of the mobile learning system. Section 4 describes the implementation of this system in a real class.

2. System Function

The mobile learning system includes the mobile phone broadcasting sub-system, and the classroom management sub-system. The systems physical framework can be divided into three parts: classroom cluster, server, and client on mobile phone. Instructors, students, and system administrators are the three groups that are involved in this mobile learning; and each of them plays an important role in the successful

delivery of course content and materials to mobile devices. The instructors carry out the multimedia instruction via the instructor station, which supports handwriting on the computer screen. During their teaching, the instructors use either PowerPoint slides or handwriting on the screen. Cameras and microphones that are connected to the computer will capture the live scenes of the classroom. A recording program, which is part of the mobile phone broadcasting sub-system, will record all these media components: audio, video, handwriting, and PowerPoint presentations. In the meantime, the instructor station will display messages from the students, reporting their learning progress, their questions, or their feedback to the instruction. These messages are delivered as cell phone text messages through SMS (Short Message Service). To address these messages, the instructor can give oral explanations or can reply through short text-messaging. In addition, this mobile learning system can also display the screen of all students mobile devices that are tuning into his/her live broadcast on a larger screen, through which the instructor can supervise students learning [9], and can also take an instant poll on any aspect related to the instruction, pace, clarity, content, structure, etc.

When the students connect their smart phones to the GPRS network, they can download and install the client program. When they run the client program just as they would other applications installed on the mobile phones, they will be able to see the curriculum schedule of that day, and also all the classes that are being conducted at that moment. Students can choose which class to tune in to, and also in what format the live broadcast should be displayed, either as teachers screen+audio+small video of the real-time classroom, or simply video of the instructor, or a close-in on the instructors facial expression and body languages. The former modality can create the context of learning, that is, the feeling of being in a real classroom with the instructor and many other students nearby. Once a students mobile phone connects to a class, its screen will be sent to the instructor periodically, so that the instructor can monitor the students learning status. Meanwhile, students can send short text-messaging to the instructor and they can participate in polls and other in-class activities. The mobile learning server will generate the poll results and immediately send them to the instructor for him to adjust or improve the instruction. The system administrators mainly take charge of maintaining servers and arranging the curriculum schedule. They have the sole ability to change the class schedule, through a web-based application that connects to the system database.

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'06) 0-7695-2632-2/06 $20.00 2006 IEEE

The instructors, students, and system administrators cooperate to create a virtual classroom that includes both online and classroom students and the real-time communication between online students and the instructors. However, their cooperation relies on the support of the mobile learning system, which conducts the coding and decoding of the multimedia teaching stream and manages the time delay.

3. System Architecture

Figure 1 below displays the configuration of this system. To be visually clear, the broadcasting sub-system is indicated in orange color, and the management sub-system is indicated in green color.

From the real-time classroom, the multimedia teaching stream -- which includes video, audio, handwriting, lecture notes and other forms of communication -- is coded in the classroom cluster. The system will export the multimedia streams in two formats with different coding qualities to accommodate students different bandwidth. Through the CERNET (China Educational Research Network) or cable network, the streams arrive at the broadcast and the management servers at the University. A powerful database is built to store class information and messages during the lessons, which provide many opportunities for data mining research. Via GPRS network, mobile phones receive the streams and initiate votes or short text-messaging feedback along the reverse direction. The tradeoff between stability and latency is established when the stream is played back on the mobile phones.

4. System Implementation

The system was tested with a classroom of 50 campus students and 30 online students. As described earlier, the multimedia teaching stream is connected to the classroom cluster. System administrators select a certain codec, configure it with the parameters of the classroom cluster, and then connect the classroom cluster to the broadcasting server with IP address and classroom tags. The recording program gathers the instructors screen, video and audio data, and codes the stream with the selected and configured codec. We select H.264, MPEG-4 aacPlus and CSMX as the video, audio and screen codec respectively after comparing with DivX, MP3 and MediaEncoder. To ensure portability, we build each codec as a dynamic link library which can be used both in the recording program and in the mobile phone client.

As the core of this system, the broadcasting server bridges the classroom cluster to mobile phones. As viewed from the broadcasting perspective, each socket provides the technical backbone of a virtual classroom, and each virtual classroom transmits the compressed video, audio and screen data to the mobile phones connected to it. So N real-time classrooms logically correspond to 2*N virtual classrooms.

Figure 1. The Architecture of the Mobile Learning System

The mobile phone client is developed using Series 60 SDK 2.1 for Symbian OS [11]. To transplant to other mobile phones based on Symbian [12], we introduce GUI + Engine structure. This configuration helps reduce unnecessary dependency among program modules, and the engine can be migrated onto Symbian platform. The GUI part mainly manages operations related to user interface, responding to users requests, and then passing them to the engine. Students can easily choose the study mode by pressing a key on the mobile phone. Figures 2 - 4 display the three modes for students to receive the live or archived broadcast.

The broadcasting sub-system supplies multimedia teaching streams from a real-time classroom to mobile phones. A few key issues remain to be addressed, including knowing students learning status and facilitating the effective interaction between students and the instructor. The management sub-system,

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'06) 0-7695-2632-2/06 $20.00 2006 IEEE

consisting of course schedule update, short text-messaging, and feedback through polls, is built to serve such purposes and so to improve instruction quality.

Figure 2. Video + Audio + Screen

Figure 3. Zoom-In Screen + Audio

Figure 4. Zoom-In Video + Audio The mobile phone client downloads occasional

schedule changes to students mobile phones, when they log in to the mobile learning system. When attending the class through their mobile phones, students sent in short text-messaging to communicate with the instructor, which included questions,

suggestions, requests, or any other type of feedback. The instructor addressed these messages either by typing on the screen or giving an oral explanation, which the entire class could see or hear. Feedback through instant polls helped to reduce the transactional distance [13] between the instructor and the students. Transactional distance refers to the amount of structure and dialogue governing the communication relationship between student and teacher and is dependent upon course structure, level of dialogue between each learner and the teacher, and learner self-direction in learning. When the dialogue between participants decreases, students perceived psychological distance with others (transactional distance) also increases. Through the instant polls, students also evaluated the instructors lecturing pace, legibility of handwriting, and voice volume. The GUI captured students votes and displayed the vote results on the mobile phone screen that has just conducted the poll (See figure 5). The first column indicates ratings of the lecturing pace as being too fast, the second item indicates ratings as being appropriate pace, and the third are ratings as being too slow.

Figure 5. Speech Vote Result

The voting result was calculated for this classroom and returned to mobile phones and the web browser on the instructor station. Based on the results, the instructor made timely adjustments to improve his/her classroom presentation. The instruction quality is likely to improve because of the increased frequency and quality between student and instructor communication.

5. Conclusions and future work

The mobile learning system described in this paper is innovative in the following ways:

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'06) 0-7695-2632-2/06 $20.00 2006 IEEE

1) Using the Symbian S60 Smart Phone Platform, the system broadcasts real-time classroom activities -- including video, audio, lecture notes, and handwritings -- to students mobile phones via the GPRS network. During this broadcast, all activities occurring in a real classroom are synthesized onto the mobile phones and are then played back in real time. Based on the students GPRS network condition and their preferences, they can customize how to receive the broadcast. 2) We propose a self-adaptive play back mechanism on the mobile phones to help maintain a good balance between the stability and latency of broadcast. Because of the GPRS networks narrow bandwidth and instability, we suggest ways to overcome the problems such as the long delay in tuning in, the breaking-up of playing back, and the delay accumulation after a long time playback, in an effort to ensure the real-time interactions among the instructor and the students. 3) Based on the TCP/IP protocol, we implemented a system to enable the instructor to monitor all online students mobile phone screens without too much delay, so as to facilitate instructor supervision of students learning activities and to provide guidance when necessary. We also designed several teaching-assisting mechanisms such as a real-time poll and text-messaging exchanges, to enable instructors and students to freely and timely communicate about their learning status and about students suggestions for better teaching. The system described in this paper has been tested with a real classroom and the results related to system function and teaching efficiency are positive. However, much work remains be done in the future. Better technologies must be sought to improve the delivery of video and audio streams. In addition, audio interaction should also be an option in this mobile learning system, which can further improve the quality of mobile learning. Finally, through pilot testing this system in real classrooms, many pedagogical issues can be addressed. For instance, how can the system help build an effective virtual learning environment

among large number of online students? What are the best ways for the instructor to facilitate blended classrooms that include both face-to-face and online students? What are students experiences in using this mobile learning system? These and other questions warrant serious attention in the coming years.

6. References

[1] P. Harris, Goin' Mobile, Learning Circuits, 2001, http://www.learningcircuits.org/2001/jul2001/harris.html

[2] J. S., Kossen, When e-learning Becomes M-Learning, Palmpower Magazine, 2001.

[3] C. Quinn, mLearning: Mobile, Wireless, In-Your-Pocket Learning, Linezine: Learning in the New Economy, Fall 2000,(http://www.linezine.com/2.1/features/cqmmwiyp.htm)

[4] A. Trifonova, & M. Ronchetti, Where is Mobile Learning Going? Proceedings of the E-Learn 2003 Conference, Phoenix, USA, 2003.

[5] M. Sharples, Learning As Conversation: Transforming Education in the Mobile Age, Proceedings of Conference on Seeing, Understanding, Learning in the Mobile Age, Budapest, Hungary, 2005.

[6] T-C. Liu, H-Y. Wang, J-K Liang, T-W Chan, H-W. Ko, and J-C. Yang, Wireless and mobile technologies to enhance teaching and learning, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 19, 3, pp. 371-382, 2003.

[7] G. Schwabe, and C. Gth, Mobile Learning with a Mobile Game: Design and Motivational Effects, Journalof Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 21, 3, pp. 204-216, June 2005.

[8] M. Sharples, D. Corlett, & O. Westmancott, The Design and Implementation of a Mobile Learning Resource, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 6, pp. 220234, 2002.

[9] R. Tong, Z.W. Hu, P. Han, and F Yang, A Novel Mobile Learning Assistant System, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3583, pp. 340-348, Springer 2005.

[10] Http://www.series60.com/ [11] Http://www.forum.nokia.com/ [12] Http://www.Symbian.com/ [13] F. Saba, Integrated telecommunications systems and

instructional transaction, The American Journal of Distance Education, 2(3), 17-24E, 1988.

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT'06) 0-7695-2632-2/06 $20.00 2006 IEEE

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