Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2005, Pages 53-68
Computers & Education

Mobile educational features in authoring tools for personalised tutoring

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2003.12.020Get rights and content

Abstract

One important field where mobile technology can make significant contributions is Education. In the fast pace of modern life, students and instructors would appreciate using constructively some spare time that they may have, in order to work on lessons at any place, even when away from offices, classrooms and labs where computers are usually located. In this paper, we describe a mobile authoring tool that we have developed and is called Mobile Author. Mobile Author can be used by human instructors either from a computer or a mobile phone to create their own Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and to distribute them to their students. After the ITSs have been created, students can also use any computer or mobile phone to have access to theory and tests. The tutoring systems can assess the students' performance, inform the data-bases that record the students' progress and provide advice adapted to the needs of individual students. Finally, instructors can monitor their students' progress and communicate with their students during the course. The mobile features of both the authoring tool itself and the resulting ITSs from it have been evaluated by instructors and students, respectively. The results of the evaluation showed that mobile features are indeed considered useful.

Introduction

There are many virtues of web-based educational software, which have been recognised by educators and educational institutions. Some important assets include platform-independence and the practical facility offered to students of learning something at any time and any place. In many situations this means that learning may take place at home or some other site, supervised remotely and asynchronously by a human instructor but away from the settings of a real class.

However, in many cases it would be extremely useful to have such facilities in handheld devices, rather than desktop or portable computers so that users could use the software on a device that they can carry anywhere they go. Handheld devices render the software usable on every occasion, even when one is standing rather than sitting. Among handheld devices, which include palm or pocket PCs and mobile phones, the mobile phones provide the additional very important asset of computer-device independence for users. This is so because unlike mobile phones, palm-top PCs have to be bought by a person for the special purposes of computer use. On the other hand, mobile phones are very wide spread devices, which are primarily used for speaking purposes. However, they may also be used as computers. Thus, prospective users of handheld devices do not need to buy extra computer equipment since they can use their mobile phone, which they would buy and carry with them anyway. In this sense, using the mobile phone as a handheld computer is a very cost-effective solution that provides many assets. Such assets include device independence as well as more independence with respect to time and place in comparison with web-based education using standard PCs. Indeed, there are situations where students and instructors could use some spare time constructively to finish off their homework and lesson preparation, respectively, in situations where no computer may be available. Such situations may occur in trains, buses and coaches while commuting, in long queues while waiting or when unexpected spare time comes up. In the fast pace of modern life such situations can be very frequent.

In view of these compelling needs, the research work described in this paper has dealt with the problem of enriching existing educational software technology with mobile aspects. In particular, it has dealt with authoring tools and Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). This work resulted in the development of an authoring tool that can generate ITSs of multiple domains. The authoring tool is called Mobile Author.

Authoring tools in general are meant to be used by human instructors (prospective authors) to build tutors in a wide range of domains, including customer service, mathematics, equipment maintenance, and public policy; these tutors have been targeted toward a wide range of students, from grade school children to corporate trainees (Murray, 1999). More specifically, authoring tools that specialise at ITSs aim at providing environments for cost-effective development of tutoring systems that can be intelligent and adaptive to individual students. The main goal of ITSs as compared to other educational technologies, is to provide highly individualised guidance to students. It is simple logic that response individualised to a particular student must be based on some information about that student; in ITS technology this realisation led to student modelling, which became a core or even defining issue for the field (Cumming & McDougall, 2000).

Mobile Author allows instructors to create and administer data-bases concerning characteristics of students, of the domain to be taught and of tests and homework. The creation and administration of these data-bases can be carried out through a user-friendly interface from any computer or mobile phone. In this way the creation of mobile ITSs is facilitated enormously and a high degree of reusability is ensured.

Similarly, in the resulting tutoring applications, students can answer test questions and can read parts of the theory from any computer or mobile phone. The underlying reasoning of the tutoring systems is based on the student modelling component of the resulting educational applications. The student modelling component monitors the students' actions while they use the educational system and tries to diagnose possible problems, recognise goals, record permanent habits and errors that are made repeatedly. The inferences made by the system concerning the students' characteristics are recorded in their student model that is used by the system to offer advice adapted to the needs of individual students. Moreover, the students' characteristics can be accessed by human instructors who may wish to see their students' progress.

Section snippets

Related work

Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) has grown enormously during the past decades and has been enhanced by the recent advances in web-based applications, multimedia technology, intelligent systems and software engineering. CAL may be used by instructors in a complementary way for their courses. Students may use educational software inside and outside classrooms in order to learn, practice and consolidate their knowledge. They may also use software from remote places in cases where the instructor is

Mobile authoring architecture and procedure

Mobile Author allows human instructors to create their own ITS in the domain they are interested in. For this purpose, human instructors have to insert domain data through a user-friendly interface from any computer or mobile device they wish to use. Then Mobile Author provides the reasoning mechanisms needed for the creation of a complete ITS.

The overall architecture of Mobile Author is illustrated in Fig. 1. Instructors can communicate with the system through IIS Server. This is how they can

Mobile tutoring and course management

When an ITS has been created by an author (instructor), it may be used by students as an educational tool while instructors can be assisted in the management of the course and the assessment of their students. As a result, at this stage both kinds of user (students and instructors) can use the application to cooperate in the educational process. The instructor and the students are not only able to have easy access to the data-bases of the application but they can also “communicate” with each

Evaluation

Software that is meant to help the educational process can be considered successful if it is approved by human instructors and is educationally beneficial to students. Otherwise it may not even be included in the educational process and may not be accepted by its targeted users. Thus, evaluation of this kind of software is an important phase that has to follow development at all times. In particular, formative evaluation is one of the most critical steps in the development of learning materials

Conclusions

Mobile phones have already become very popular among people and thus they are imposing a new culture. As a result, their use in education as a new tutoring and communication medium can be very useful. However, in the case of education, many design issues have to be taken seriously into account so that the resulting applications can be educationally beneficial to students and be included in the educational process. Among these important design features, is the high degree of adaptivity and

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