Mobile technology in educational services.

The use of computers and the Internet has successfully enabled educational institutions to provide their students and staff members with various online educational services. With the recent developments in mobile technology, further possibilities are emerging to provide such services through mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. By extending the educational services to wireless medium, the educational institutions can potentially bring great convenience to those off-campus learners who do not always have time to find Internet enabled computers to get the important information from their academic institutions. With the mobile educational services, both the learners and the teachers can access the services anytime and anywhere they want. This article first discusses those educational services that can be moved to the mobile platform and then describes a mock-up system to integrate these services into the mobile platform. The article will conclude with a description of the formative evaluation of the mock-up system.

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For decades now, computers have achieved great success in educational institutions. Computer and Internet-based educational applications are quite popular throughout the world. However, education has already become a life long activity. People undertake study related activities anytime and anywhere they find suitable. For example, people in current workforce, who wish to upgrade their skills through some off-campus courses access content material during breaks, evenings, and on travel, and want to be informed of all the necessary notices, assignment deadlines, and supervisor advices during their busy schedule. Recent emergence of mobile technologies has started to make this task much more feasible and convenient for those learners.

The handheld devices for example, mobile phones, handheld computers, and personal digital assistant (PDA) are more portable and affordable than before. According to an estimate from Microsoft, by the end of 2002, there will be nearly 100 million PDAs in use worldwide. Sharples (2000) believed that palmtop computers could be useful lifelong learning tools because such tools could accompany learners throughout their lives, and be used to input data and access information whenever the learner feels it is necessary. Another popular mobile device, the mobile phone, has achieved 206 million subscribers in China in 2002, which is 16.19% of China's population (Wan, 2002). It is certain that in most developed countries, the rate will be even higher. The large mobile phone subscribers' base also makes mobile phones another good infrastructure for mobile educational services.

Mobile Education

The use of mobile technology in education is rather new. There is no agreed definition for the term "mobile education" though many variants are available. For example, Lehner & Nosekabel (2002) defined it as "any service or facility that supplies a learner with general electronic information and educational content that aids in acquisition of knowledge regardless of location and time." Vavoula and Sharples (2002) indicated "three ways in which learning can be considered mobile: learning is mobile in terms of space; it is mobile in different areas of life; it is mobile with respect to time." From these definitions, a mobile education system should be capable of delivering education content anytime and anywhere the learners need it. The learners can either be full time oncampus students or off-campus students. Learning activities can be completed even when the learners and the teachers are both "mobile."

Designing Pattern for Mobile Education

As a new wave in education, Mobile learning benefits with certain characteristics (Chen, Kao, Sheu, & Chiang, 2002):

1. urgency of learning need;

2. initiative of knowledge acquisition;

3. mobility of Learning setting;

4. interactivity of learning process;

5. situating of instructional activities; and

6. integration of instructional content."

Therefore mobile education needs to adopt its own pattern or model. In traditional classroom learning environment, all the activities, such as lectures, assignments, discussions, presentations, and so on, are all carried out at a designated place and time. Desktop computerized education extends the range of education to places where wired connection is ready. Now with mobile technologies, the range of education can be further extended by wireless connection to places and time of learners' choice regardless of availability of wired infrastructure. This is a significant step towards the learners beginning to gain control over their own learning schedule. The shift from desktop to palmtop education has great potential of facilitating the learning activities, which consequently increases the efficiency of educational information exchange between the learners and the teachers.

Patel, Russell, Kinshuk, Oppermann, & Rashev (1998) presented an initial framework of contexts for designing learning environments. There are three contexts concerning the learning environments: (a) interaction context, (b) environmental context, and (c) objectival context. The definition, best suited to the mobile education framework, suggests that the context of something consists of the ideas, situations, events or information that relates to it and makes it possible to understand it fully (Akman & Surav, 1996). It is observed, however, that the practical implementations based on the notion of context differ from each other significantly in terms of their understanding of context and the corresponding functionality provided in a learning environment (Patel et al.). It is therefore important that we fully consider the contexts to which our designed system may apply.

Contextual Life-long Learning (CoLL) defines the Life-long Learning to be an activity not confined to prespecified times and places and the traditional education cannot provide people all the knowledge and skills that they need to prosper throughout their life-time (Sharples, 2000). The general requirements for technologies to support contextual life-long learning provided initial constraints on the design, that is, the technologies should be highly portable, individual, unobtrusive, available anywhere, adaptable to the context of learning and the learner's evolving skills and knowledge, persistent, useful, and easy to use (Sharples).

Since mobile learners, who are typically distant learners, usually work on their own without external support and have various learning background and levels, customized system behavior reduces meta-learning overhead for the learners and allows focus on completion of the actual task. Therefore, the mobile learning systems should allow the learners to change certain system parameters and adapt the system behavior accordingly, that is, mobile learning system should also be adaptable (Kinshuk, 2003). There are two different forms of adaptation that need balancing: (a) adaptivity, that is, the system adapts its output using some data or knowledge about the learner in a system controlled way and (b) adaptability, where the system supports end-user modifiability providing learners control over several functionalities (Papanikolaou, Grigoriadou, Ornilakis, & Magoulas, 2003).

Mobile Solutions

Even though there have been some very dramatic recent developments in mobile technologies, the mobile devices and mobile networks still have some severe limitations compared to the desktop systems: the bandwidth of wireless networks is relatively low; the screen size is very small, and the display of many devices in existence is mono-colour; the CPU and memory capacity are both limited; and they have limited input facilities. Therefore, in order to deliver the educational services wirelessly to the mobile devices, it is necessary to choose a wireless development platform that specifically supports these devices and generates content that can be delivered to these devices in customised form. Currently, there are mainly three solutions: WAP, J2ME, and AvantGo. The prototype in this article is constructed using WAP/WML. This is because WML is quite similar to HTML for the Internet. Many existing resources can therefore be converted for the mobile application with little additional effort. The latest version, WAP 2.0, adopts XHTML basic as its mark-up language. By using XHTML, the developers can construct applications for both PC and WAP users (WAP Forum, 2001), which will save lots of development time and provide different users with consistent services. The only additional requirement for the mobile devices to run WAP applications is micro browser that is usually included in the mobile phones as default software. On the other hand, J2ME creates applications that can be run only on Java-enabled devices and the applications require more processor power, a limitation that exists for most mobile devices in existence. AvantGo also asks the users to install additional software to run the mobile services: AvantGo Client on user's devices, AvantGo server on the server side and Mobile Link on the computers for synchronization. Therefore, after a careful comparison, WAP appears to be the best solution to construct the infrastructure for mobile educational services.

It should be noted that WAP is not always better than J2ME and AvantGo in every aspect. For example, WAP cannot manipulate data or perform complex applications and it must always be connected to a server as opposed to J2ME that does not require continuous connection (Deitel, Deitel, Nieto, & Steinbuhler, 2002). AvantGo creates channels for mobile users. The channels are just like simplified web pages. They are written in the same language as the normal web pages. Therefore, there is no need for the developers to learn a new language to compose the mobile web applications, and there is no need to convert existing websites to another language. The only requirement is to send the required contents to the users in an optimized format. Though WML is quite similar to HTML, they are different languages. Existing websites need to be converted to WML format to be viewed by mobile devices. AvantGo channels also support both connected and disconnected users. The large majority of AvantGo users are typically disconnected users, that is, they use PDAs without a continuous online connection. They basically turn on their modems, sync their channels, and then disconnect. Then they read the cached pages.

As technology will progress, there will be more and more integration of WAP/WML, Java, and AvantGo technologies. But as of now, WAP/WML provides the right solution without additional requirements on the part of developers and users.

WAP System Framework

Since the system is constructed with WAP/WML, it adopts WAP gateway to encode and decode the contents between the server and the mobile devices. The users send URL requests by way of the mobile network to a WAP gateway, using the WAP protocol. The gateway translates these requests into HTTP requests and sends to appropriate web servers. The servers send corresponding WML contents with HTTP headers to the gateway. The gateway then sends them back to the users. Micro browser then processes the WML and displays the contents (Bulbrook, 2001). Services are arranged as modules that can be accessed from the server. Service providers can administer and change the contents or services on the servers, while the users do not need to install new software to obtain the new contents and services (Figure 1).

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Functionalities of the Prototype System

The prototype system to integrate mobile educational services has been designed to provide services for both teachers and students. There are all together seven service modules in the prototype system namely news, help. classified ads, academic, financial, library, and account. Both types of users can access news and help services without logging in. For rest of the services, a login is required.

* News

This option provides all updated campus news for the teachers and students. All the news is listed by their headings. The users can read the news by clicking into the corresponding heading. Long news items are divided into several screens because the display of the mobile device is limited to only several lines of texts.

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* Help

Users can find all the basic operation guides in the subtitle "help topics." This may help the users get familiar with the system and let them make good use of the services. If the users select the Help Topics option from the menu, they get a list of operation guides for every option inside our system.

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If the users choose FAQs, they can view a list of frequently asked questions about the system operations. They can find the answers to these questions under this section.

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If the users choose Contacts in the Help Menu, they get two options: Contact List and Search Contact. The users can choose the first option "Contact List" and get a complete list of all contact details that is arranged by the colleges or departments.

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If the users do not know where to find a particular contact, they can choose the second option "Search Contact." There, they can type the names of the staff members and search for their contact details.

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After login in the system either as a student or as a teacher, the options are presented differently. The common options are classified ads, library and account.

* Classified Ads

Both teachers and students can use this service to post their advertisements and view other people's posts. This helps the users in exchanging available study related materials and useful information such as accommodation and so on.

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* Library

This function helps the users in managing their own lending records, including a reminder to the users about the due dates of the borrowed books.

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* Account

Account management module in the mobile educational service system not only enables the users to change their pin number for login, but also their contact details such as postal address and e-mail.

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There are two functions that are different for teachers and students:

* Academic

Students can access five subtitles under this function: status, enrolment, timetable, exam results, and course centre. Students can use these sub functions to know all the important information about their study. Inside course centre, they get a list of all the enrolled courses. They can get the information such as assignment, notices, and coordinator's contact.

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There is also a discussion forum for each course. Students can submit questions in the discussion forum and get the answers from classmates or teachers.

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The teachers only have course centre under the academic function. They are authorised to do the modification of the course information such as assignments, notices, and coordinator's contact, while the students can only view these information.

* Financial

This function records all the information of the tuition fee budget. There is a clear list of how the fee was spent. Teachers do not have such a function as they do not need it.

Formative System Evaluation

A formative evaluation was carried out for the prototype where 25 participants used the system and provided their feedback in the form of a questionnaire. The participants included:

* 1 Academic Administrator

* 1 Associate Professor

* 2 Lecturers

* 9 Postgraduate Students

* 12 Undergraduate Student

All the participants were initially asked to go through the prototype mobile education system. After getting familiar with the prototype, they were given a questionnaire to fill in.

The questionnaire contained 11 questions that inquired users' past experience with web-based educational systems and the feedback on the prototype. The questionnaire is Appendix one.

The questionnaire revealed that most of the participants had uses some sort of web-based education system at regular basis. It was also found that all undergraduate students used the web-based education system more often than the postgraduate students. All of the participants found using web-base education system somewhat useful for following reasons:

* it provides a number of services conveniently;

* it can be used to check student registration information;

* it provides quite convenient access to useful data;

* it is good in functionality;

* it provides personal information such as budget, enrolment and exam result;

* it provides academic information such as lecture notes and assignment; and

* it provides university news, and some useful advertisements.

There is only one participant who had used a mobile education application before. From this, we safely concluded that use of mobile technology in education was still quite new to most participants. When asked whether they will be willing to use a mobile education service system, most participants agreed that they will but some also disagreed.

The reasons for the agreement included:

* mobile technology is getting better and will be a future standard;

* it will be useful for part time off campus students;

* it is convenient and easy to use;

* it can save a lot of time;

* it can be used in any places, such as a cafe;

* it is interesting to use;

* it provides another option to use education systems; and

* it can be a good reminder.

The reasons for disagreement included:

* the idea is nice but the technology is not adequately ready now;

* the cost of mobile phone and wireless network is too expensive;

* there is too much information that will be hard to disseminate by wireless networks;

* the desktop system is enough;

* the data transmission speed is slow;

* the screen of mobile devices is too small to read; and

* the keyboard of mobile devices is not easy to use.

When asked if they would be willing to buy a mobile device, such as mobile phone or PDA, if they already did not have one to be able to use mobile education service system, the response was equally divided (28% disagreed, 36% agreed, and 36% did not know).

The reasons for agreement included:

* mobile devices can also be used for other purpose, such as taking notes;

* mobile phone is indispensable in life;

* it's easy and convenient to get information by mobile devices;

* mobile devices will be widely used;

* there will be more services provided through mobile devices; and

* it's quite helpful in study.

The reasons for disagreement included:

* mobile devices are too expensive; and

* it's not necessary, the desktop system is enough for me.

Those who had no opinion on this question were generally worried about the price. If the price would be reasonable, they might agree to buy the device.

The feedback on the usefulness of the prototype was largely positive. Eighty percent of the participants agreed that the prototype is a good complement to the existing web-based systems. Their reasons included:

* students can get all information related to their studies through one commonly used interface;

* the services are available wherever and whenever you need them;

* it will be useful to those who use mobile phone and the desktop education system a lot;

* all important functions of desktop system are provided in the mobile system;

* handy access to all essential information;

* simple and user friendly;

* users can adapt to the system easily;

* information can be delivered to the users more quickly; and

* it is useful when you cannot find a computer with Internet connection.

Those who disagreed (8%) responded that the prototype was not a complete system. It did not yet have database connections with the university infrastructure and had not been tested in a real environment. Twelve percent of the participants did not have any opinion.

In terms of convenience to the users, 80% of all the participants agree or strongly agree that the prototype mobile education system can bring more convenience to the users. Their reasons include:

* the information can be get from a commonly used interface;

* the information can be accessed regardless of place and time;

* mobile phone users will find it convenient to get information;

* it will be relatively intuitive by using mobile devices;

* the mobile devices are easy to carry;

* it can be used where there is no wired internet connection;

* the function list of the prototype is easier to use; and

* the users can carry all the information around.

Twelve percent of the participants had no opinion on this matter. The rest (8%), who disagreed gave following reasons for their disagreement:

* the functionality of the mobile education system is not as good as the desktop system, so it will not bring more convenience; and

* the prototype is not a complete system, so it's not convincing enough.

Most participants agreed that the user interface of the prototype was easy to use. Eighty-four percent of the participants found the user interface easy to understand and use. Three participants (12%) had no opinion about the user interface because they were not using this mobile education system in real mobile devices. Only one participant found the user interface hard to use through the key board of a mobile phone.

When asked for suggested improvements, participants came up with following suggestions:

* provide easier navigation;

* include mailing list for each paper;

* add more library functions;

* condense information to achieve faster access;

* the user interface should include more graphics;

* to use ID numbers instead of user names for login the system; and

* the enrolment option should provide more information, such as academic requirements, admission policy and so on.

In terms of the most beneficial feature in the prototype, following suggestions were recorded:

* immediate access to library information;

* combined access to multiple information resources;

* automatic update of library records;

* assignment due dates listed in timetable option;

* the menu is simple to use;

* course information can be viewed immediately and easily; and

* the users need to login the system to get personalized information;

Participants were asked to suggest additional functionality in the prototype. The list of suggestions included:

* support user profiles;

* books should be renewed with mobile education system;

* the students should be able to send short messages to staffs;

* link e-mail and phone to call and e-mail displayed contact;

* the users should be able to access the mobile system through the desktop system;

* include Student Association information;

* enhance the user interface with multimedia effects;

* include broadcasting function;

* add links to relevant learning resources;

* classify paper information by department or major;

* tuition fee payment function;

* exam results sent by short messages;

* provide lecturers' office hour to the students; and

* integrate e-mail function in the mobile system;

In summary, about 80% of the participants agreed that the prototype will be a good complement to the existing web-based systems and it will bring more convenience to the users in receiving the educational services.

CONCLUSION

In this article, we described a prototype for a mobile system for educational services. To be useful for most existing mobile devices that are limited in display and input, the prototype uses a rather simple user interface. However, the evaluation of the prototype has shown that the mobile education service system can be a useful complement to the current desktop systems. Both the learners and the teachers will benefit from the mobile education system for convenient and instant access to education resources. With the rapid development of mobile technologies, mobile devices will be much more powerful than current ones. Then, they can support more attractive user interface and more functionality. Moreover, if the mobile internet connection charges drop to a level affordable by the typical learners, such systems could be useful for both oncampus and offcampus students alike.

APPENDIX 1: SYSTEM EVALUATION QUESTIONNAIRE

1. How often do you use a Web-based Education System, e.g. myMassey?

1. Never used  2. Once every  3. Once a   4. Once a week  5. Everyday
                  few months     month

2. How useful is such a Web-based Education System to you?

1. Not useful  2. Somewhat useful  3. Useful  4. Very useful  5. Never
                                                                 used

Please explain why.

3. Have you ever used any MOBILE application for education?

[Which one:]
* Yes
* No

4. Will you consider using a Mobile Education System through mobile devices and wireless networks?

1. Strongly Disagree  2. Disagree  3. No opinion  4. Agree  5. Strongly
                                                               Agree

Please give reasons:

a.

b.

c.

5. If you don't have any mobile device (e.g. mobile phone, PDA) currently, will you be willing to buy a mobile device in order to use a Mobile Education System?

1. Strongly Disagree  2. Disagree  3. No opinion  4. Agree  5. Strongly
                                                               Agree

Please explain why.

6. Does the Mobile Education System prototype presented to you here show enough evidence that it can be a good complement to the existing web-based systems?

1. Strongly Disagree  2. Disagree  3. No opinion  4. Agree  5. Strongly
                                                               Agree

Please give reasons:

a.

b.

c.

7. Does the prototype show enough evidence that it will bring more convenience to the users?

1. Strongly Disagree  2. Disagree  3. No opinion  4. Agree  5. Strongly
                                                               Agree

Please give reasons:

a.

b.

c.

8. Do you think that the user interface of the prototype is easy to use?

1. Strongly Disagree  2. Disagree  3. No opinion  4. Agree  5. Strongly
                                                               Agree

9. If you were to pick one functionality of the prototype that needs the most improvement, what would it be?

10. What was the most beneficial feature in the prototype?

11. If you were to suggest one additional functionality in the prototype, what would it be?

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Patel, A., Russell, D., Kinshuk, Oppermann, R., & Rashev, R. (1998). An initial framework of contexts for designing usable intelligent tutoring systems. Information Services and Use, 18(1-2), 65-76.

Sharples, M. (2000). The design of personal mobile technologies for life long learning. Computers and Education, 34, 177-193.

Vavoula, G.N., & Sharples, M. (2002). KleOS: A personal, mobile, knowledge and learning organization system. In M. Milrad, H.U. Hoppe, & Kinshuk (Eds.), IEEE International workshop on wireless and mobile technologies in education, (p. 152). August 29-30, 2002. Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.

Wan, X.D. (2002). Statistics Of China mobile phone sales & production 2002. Retrieved July 25, 2003, from http://www.mii.gov.cn/mii/hyzw/tongji/2003-03-0702.htm

JUEMING CHEN AND KINSHUK

Massey University 

New Zealand 

[e-mail]