Maiga Chang

Location-Based Adaptive Mobile Learning Research Framework and Topics

Location-based adaptive mobile learning utilizes a unique feature: location awareness of mobile devices in regards to other online learning to implement location-based functionalities or features to create adaptive and collaborative learning in mobile learning environment. There are many important research issues and technical challenges in the location-based adaptive mobile learning systems, including the assessment of learning in the mobile environment. In this paper, we present the research framework and topics related to the undergoing research project at Athabasca University towards the development of robust and effective location-based adaptive mobile learning systems. In addition, we also brief some the major research outcomes achieved so far within the project’s research framework.

A Treasure Hunting Learning Model for Students Studying History and Culture in the Field with Cellphone

In the treasure hunting process, the hunters could only get few hints with simple words, therefore they must think over with the experience they learned before. The goal of this paper is to propose a treasure hunting learning model and implement a system based on the model. Within the treasure hunting learning model students will become a treasure hunter when they are learning in the field. The learning model makes learning more fun by asking students some questions according to their learning records and physical position. In order to make the system portable and treasure hunting liked, we implement the treasure hunting learning model with the most simple and common cellphone, that is the text-mode cellphone. To verify the learning model is working, a traditional history and culture course in college was taken as the experiment.

An Infrastructure for Developing Pervasive Learning Environments

This paper presents an infrastructure for developing problem-based pervasive learning environments. Building such environments necessitates having many autonomous components dealing with various tasks and heterogeneous distributed resources. Our proposed infrastructure is based on a multi-agent system architecture to integrate various components of the environments. The infrastructure includes a location- and context-awareness service, a question and answer service, an adaptive mechanism; problem based ubiquitous learning models, social networking issues, and the evaluation of multimedia inputs. Furthermore, student modeling issues among components are considered. The design of the infrastructure as well as its components is discussed. This paves the way towards the development of pervasive learning applications.

Learning Historical and Cultural Contents via Mobile Treasure Hunting in Five-Harbor District of Tainan, Taiwan

Traditional formal education asks students studying in classroom and listening to teacher’s lecturing. Recent years, teachers are taking students out from the classroom and doing field trip for learning history and cultural contents. Students can benefit from situated learning theory by interacting with the historical objects, local people, and cultural atmosphere. This research combines treasure hunting and mobile phone together to create a mobile treasure hunting learning situation for students learning historical and cultural contents during the field trip. In this mobile treasure hunting learning model, students act as hunters who can get hints through their mobile phones to find the treasures -- the knowledge of historical and cultural contents. The mobile phones provide students not only display interface of treasure hunting maps and clues, but also position locator and treasure collector. In the experiment that eighteen elementary school students (5th Grade) learning in five-harbor district of Tainan, Taiwan.

Architecture and collaborations among agents in mobile educational game

We describe a multi-agent based context-aware mobile educational game that can generate a series of learning activities for users doing on-the-job training in their working environment. In this paper, we reveal the multi-agent architecture (MAA) that is designed in the mobile educational game. The multi-agent architecture design enables development of a lightweight, flexible, and scalable game on the platform with limited resources such as mobile phones. Six agents have been implemented that worked together in this game. Each agent has its own tasks and sometimes needs help from other agents. Using agents in developing system can not only solve the limited resource issue, but also provide us a way to add further functions and to replace agents into the game easily to improve the game anytime. This paper focuses on designing the tasks that each agent needs to do and the collaborations that may happen among agents.

Transition from e-Learning to u-Learning: Innovations and Personalization Issues

Use of mobile and sensor technologies in learning has emerged as a growing research area, and has given rise to a lot of research that takes advantage of learners location, environment, proximity and situation to contextualizing the learning process. The adaptivity and personalization in these scenarios have taken a new meaning by bringing authentic learning much closer to holistic learning by seamlessly integrating physical objects available in the learners vicinity with virtual information in real-time. Such ubiquitous environments not only break the barriers for education by widening the access to those who cannot come to a physical classroom but also increase the richness of the instruction by integrating multiple sources of instruction, contextualization and real-time location-aware learning, hence overcoming the limitations of classroom learning. This paper focuses on various contexts that arise in such environments where seamless immersion of formal and informal activities and interactions has potential to contribute to the learning process.

Automarking: Automatic Assessment of Open Questions

A number of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) exist on the market today. A subset of a LMS is the component in which student assessment is managed. In some forms of assessment, such as open questions, the LMS is incapable of evaluating the students’ responses and therefore human intervention is necessary. In order to assess at higher levels of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, it is necessary to include open-style questions in which the student is given the task as well as the freedom to arrive at a response without the comfort of recall words and/or phrases. Automating the assessment process of open questions is an area of research that has been ongoing since the 1960s. Earlier work focused on statistical or probabilistic approaches based primarily on conceptual understanding. Recent gains in Natural Language Processing have resulted in a shift in the way in which free text can be evaluated. This has allowed for a more linguistic approach which focuses heavily on factual understanding. This study will leverage the research conducted in recent studies in the area of Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction and Information Retrieval in order to provide a fair, timely and accurate assessment of student responses to open questions based on the semantic meaning of those responses.

Web-Based Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MORPG) for Assessing Students' Java Programming Knowledge and Skills

This paper discusses the current practices of assessing students’ Java programming language concepts and skills by using educational multiplayer online role playing game. Some of the pitfalls of course design have been identified which need to be addressed to increase students’ motivation and to reduce students’ difficulties in grasping Java programming concepts. As a solution, a game based assessment and exercise design is proposed for Java programming which will keep students on the task, and provide motivation and challenges. The game is developed and built on web browsers with AJAX technology. The web-based game enables students to play it across different operating system platforms and AJAX makes it possible for the game to be able to provide students with rapid response and instant interplayer interactions.

Recommend Touring Routes to Travelers According to Their Sequential Wandering Behaviours

This paper presents a novel problem of route recommendation which guides the user through a series of locations. The recommendation is made by matching the users current route with the set of popular route patterns. Sequential pattern mining methods are used to extract the popular route patterns from a large set of historical route records from previous users. An application with real requirements – the Bar Tour Guide – is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Delivering Context-aware Learning Guidance in the Mobile Learning Environment based on Information Theory

Mobile Learning makes students get the advantages of both traditional learning and e-learning. How to give students learning sequence suggestions in the mobile learning environment is a big issue and is also the goal of this paper. This research uses knowledge map to store the characteristics of each learning object and designs a situated map to represent spatial knowledge in the mobile learning environment. By using these two knowledge structures, knowledge map and situated map, the system created by this research can generate various navigation sentences and ask students to observe the characteristics of learning objects. This research also takes information theory into consideration in order to decide which navigation sentence should deliver to the student first. The system calculates the entropy for each generated sentence and finds the most appropriate one to deliver to the student. At the end of this paper, an experiment system is implemented for the 5th year biology course, Plant Observation.