Aug 25 - Benavent et al, Development of a XML-based Ubiquitous System for Testing Using Smartphones

Antonio Peñalver Benavent, Oscar Martínez Bonastre and Miguel Martínez Girona.
Development of a XML-based Ubiquitous System for Testing Using
Smartphones. Operations Research Centre, Miguel Hernández University
Avda. Ferrocarril S/N. Elche (Alicante) 03202. Spain
{a.penalver, oscar.martinez}@umh.es, miguel.martinez05@alu.umh.es
Proceedings: Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Wireless, Mobile and Ubiquitous Technology in Education. WMUTE 2006

In this paper, authors introduce a novelty XMLbased m-learning author tool running on Windows Mobile-based smartphones which allows students to take different stored test. This mobile-based Application runs off-line and only connects through Internet whenever should be required. Initial performance was evaluated requesting user feed-back through informal interview, as a result a summarize evaluation of usability, user performance and behaviour was discussed respectively.

Fifteen Computer Engineering Fundamental Web Design course students participated actively in
this preliminary study. All of them had at least one mobile phone but none of them had used it like a learning tool before. Two different smartphone models were used through the experiment: a Motorola mpx220 and a Movistar TSM520. with screen resolutions of 176x220 pixels and 65535 colors.

Although research team did not perform any formative user study, they requested user feed-back trough informal interviewees and conducted a summarize evaluation of usability, user performance and behaviour. Next, a set of identified challenges are listed.


Network limited availability; both the GPRS and UMTS networks became the main user problem always dealing with network limits. Unlike XHTML or WML browser interaction, full-client program developed with .Net Compact Framework technology allowed the students to take the tests without permanent network interaction so the problem was not too severe.
Most of interaction with users was made by means of both soft keys as well as the central and scroll keys. Some users found problems to alternate between left and right soft keys and often it was not clear when they had to use the central button.
More than half of the students thought that their attention was fully loosed whenever the phone started to ring before the test was finished.
In addition, almost all students thought that the smartphone provided more privacy and freedom than a standard PC in a classroom meanwhile they were taking the tests.
The main drawback appeared with the screen resolution. Almost a half of the students thought that the font letter on the smartphone was more difficult to
read than on a PC or laptop.

The user interface is one of the more important issues in applications for small mobile phones. Unlike desktop environments, with multiple document interface applications, mobile devices have only one active task in a single window. Thus, user should be able to access easily the different application functions, rather than struggling with the developed interface.

Conclusion:
Key advantages of presented author tool are:
(i) Using ubiquitous computing has important implications for pedagogical issues because of students could access from heterogonous devices through Web technology.
(ii) Design and usability aspects has verified how the use of smartphones can provide new opportunities (and restrictions) for learning and communicating,
(iii) Evaluation suitable methodologies by allowing students to use their smartphones to answer polls or fulfil tests at any time from anywhere [11].
Moreover, the client application only connects to Internet whenever it is necessary, i.e., to download new tests or new versions of previously stored tests are available and to send the results back to the server. As a result, the economy costs derived from using the system are reduced to the maximum.

References that I may want to read further in the future:
[6] “e-Learning Application Infrastructure”, White Paper, Sun Microsystems, October 2002 . Available on line at http://www.sun.com/products-nsolutions/edu/whitepapers/pdf/
[11] Device Independence Activity Statement, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), http://www.w3c..org/2001/di/Activity.