The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning

With the advent of Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) technologies, distance education (e-learning or Web-based learning) has enabled a new era of education. There are a number of issues that have significant impact on distance education, including those from educational, sociological, and psychological perspectives. Rather than attempting to cover exhaustively all the related perspectives, in this survey article, we focus on the technological issues. A number of technology issues are discussed, including distributed learning, collaborative learning, distributed content management, mobile and situated learning, and multimodal interaction and augmented devices for e-learning. Although we have tried to include the state-of-the-art technologies and systems here, it is anticipated that many new ones will emerge in the near future. As such, we point out several emerging issues and technologies that we believe are promising, for the purpose of highlighting important directions for future research.

http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~rynson/papers/toit08.pdf

Technology supports for distributed and collaborative learning over the internet

New technological advances in user mobility and context immersion are enabling novel adaptive and pervasive learning models in ambient environments. These advances allow physical learning spaces with embedded computing capabilities to provide an augmented self-aware learning experience. In this paper, we aim at developing a novel ubiquitous learning model within a pervasive smart campus environment. The goal of our research consists of identifying the steps towards building such an environment and the involved learning processes. We define a model of a smart campus, and advocate learning practices in the light of new paradigms such as context-awareness, ubiquitous learning, pervasive environment, resource virtualization, autonomic computing and adaptive learning. We reveal a comprehensive architecture that defines the various components and their inter-operations in a smart educational environment. The smart campus approach is presented as a composition of ambient learning spaces, which are environments where physical learning resources are augmented with digital and social services. We present a model of these spaces to harness future ubiquitous learning environments. One of the distinguished features of this model is the ability to unleash the instructional value of surrounding physical structures. Another one is the provision of a personalized learning agenda when moving across these ambient learning environments. To achieve these goals, we profile learners and augment physical campus structures to advocate context-aware learning processes. We suggest a social community platform for knowledge sharing which involves peer learners, domain experts as well as campus physical resources. Within this pervasive social scope, learners are continuously immersed in a pedagogically supported experiential learning loop as a persuasive approach to learning. A learning path, which responds to learners’ goals and qualifications, autonomously guides learners in achieving their objectives in the proposed smart campus. We evaluated our ubiquitous learning approach to assert the performance of these building blocks in the proposed smart campus model. The results show interesting tradeoffs and promising insights.

Building a smart campus to support ubiquitous learning

This qualitative research has the purpose to analyze and synthesize a model of Blended Learning (BL) with IoT-based technology. Data sources are related literature, textbooks, research, articles, and websites. The author used analysis and synthesis tables with the content analysis method. IoT-based technology was considered to refer to all heterogeneous objects and devices through any networks, and BL is the educational approach to combine F2F instruction with ICT instruction. Many devices and “things” in IoT-based technology were added in class to create and improve a smart learning environment for the learning goals. This study divided BL into 4 characteristics; F2F, Self-paced, Tele-D, and Ubiquitous, which were further categorized into 3 typical cases of learning environments, Digital, Embedded, and Side-by-side cases. A framework of this model has 2 roles of user interfaces (teacher and student) which link 6 modules and a set of databases and 2 types of contexts (classroom and personal).

/pdf/a-blended-learning-model-with-iot-based-technology-66jxmx82ub.pdf

A blended learning model with IoT-based technology: effectively used when the COVID-19 pandemic?

With the heterogeneous proliferation of mobile devices, the delivery of learning materials on such devices becomes subject to more and more requirements. Personalized learning content adaptation, therefore, becomes increasingly important to meet the diverse needs imposed by devices, users, usage contexts, and infrastructure. Historical server logs offer a wealth of information on hardware capabilities, learners' preferences, and network conditions, which can be utilized to respond to a new user request with the personalized learning content created from a previous similar request. In this paper, we propose a Personalized Learning Content Adaptation Mechanism (PLCAM), which applies data mining techniques, including clustering and decision tree approaches, to efficiently manage a large number of historical learners' requests. The proposed method will intelligently and directly deliver proper personalized learning content with higher fidelity from the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)-compliant Learning Object Repository (LOR) by means of the proposed adaptation decision and content synthesis processes. Furthermore, the experimental results indicate that it is efficient and is expected to prove beneficial to learners.

https://ir.nctu.edu.tw:443/bitstream/11536/9088/1/000288799600002.pdf

A personalized learning content adaptation mechanism to meet diverse user needs in mobile learning environments

With advanced technologies, computer devices have become smaller in size but still with powerful computing ability. As a result, there are growing amount of people start to take distance education courses not only by using their PCs but also using mobile devices such as pocket PCs. Because pocket PCs are easy to carry, these devices are considered as a proper platform for distance education. We focus on the issues of transferring the current PC based sharable content object reference model (SCORM) to pocket PC based. We also introduce the prototype version of pocket SCORM run-time environment (RTE) which has been developed in our lab. Proposed pocket SCORM architecture is able to operate, even when the mobile device is physically disconnected from the network, without losing any students' learning record. Collected records are then be sent back to learning management system (LMS), runs at the sever side, after the device is back on on-line.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/9027/28651/01284043.pdf

Pocket SCORM

This paper aims at developing applications based on active RFID and wireless GSM message to construct an active student attendance system that sends the message to parents cellular phone informing whether their children are safely arrive in classroom at morning. Meanwhile, the system is also used to relieve the traffic congestion around kindergartens especially while the parents are driving cars to pick up their children after class at rush or on rainy days. Finally, the encountered problems are summarized to discuss according to our developing experience.

Using RFID technology to develop an attendance system and avoid traffic congestion around kindergartens

This study employed an eye tracking technology to explore university students’ visual attention and learning performance while learning Japanese using an interactive manga-based e-book. The developed e-book consisted of 8 pages accompanied by 13 annotations with both text and graphical formats. The subjects consisted of 60 students whose eye movements were tracked and recorded by the eye tracking system. These students came from the applied foreign language department in a northern university in Taiwan, of which 30 were assigned to high prior knowledge (PK) group and the other 30 were assigned to low PK group. Eye tracking measurements, including total contact time, number of fixations, latency of first fixation, and number of clicks on the defined regions of interest of the two groups were compared to indicate their visual attention. The results revealed that overall students spent more time on reading text and annotation than graphic information. The high PK students showed longer fixation durations on the texts, while the low PK students showed longer fixation durations on the graphics and annotations. Meanwhile, the low PK students used more clicks to look up underlined annotations whenever they didn’t know words or phrases on the e-book. In addition, with respect to the latency of the first fixation, the graphic captured the attention faster than the text because of the size and its appeal to the students. Further analysis of saccade paths indicated that the low PK students showed more inter-scanning transitions not only between the text dialog and the annotation zone but also within annotation zone. Finally, the results of reading comprehension pretest and posttest found that there was a significant difference in learning outcomes between each PK group.

Tracking students’ visual attention on manga-based interactive e-book while reading: an eye-movement approach

Real-time recording and updating of personal journeys via ubiquitous computing technologies

The sharable content object reference model (SCORM) includes a representation of distance learning contents and a behavior definition of how users should interact with the contents. Usually, SCORM-compliant systems are developed based on Web browsers or Java program. We developed a system which allows users to read SCORM-compliant course materials on hardcopy papers while an OCR-like pen device is used as an interaction mechanism. A computer, a PDA, or a cellular phone can be used in conjunction with the pen device for multimedia presentations. Our project is called the hard SCORM. Therefore, users can read textbooks in a traditional manner while behavior of reading is incorporated with the SCORM specification.

Hsuan-Pu Chang

Papers

Pocket SCORM

Using RFID technology to develop an attendance system and avoid traffic congestion around kindergartens

Tracking students’ visual attention on manga-based interactive e-book while reading: an eye-movement approach

Real-time recording and updating of personal journeys via ubiquitous computing technologies

The hard SCORM LMS: reading SCORM courseware on hardcopy textbooks