Mobile Wellness Innovation: Qi Gong App to Improve Wellness and Cognitive Resiliency in Older Adults

This pilot project explored the utility of a mobile health and wellness app to older adults interested in using low impact exercise as a protective factor against memory and mood loss. While it is known that exercise is a protective factor in preventing further cognitive regression, it is shown that adults 55 and older spend ten hours or more each day sitting or lying down, leaving the latter group even more compromised (Cavill, 2013). The piloting of a health and wellness self management tool through a mobile app featuring the Chinese exercise of Qi Gong represents an innovative, visual and accessible tool that supports daily physical activity while fostering a sense of personal empowerment and enhancing the quality of life

"In-your-pocket" and "on-the-fly:" Meeting the needs of today's new generation of online learners with mobile learning technology

In The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, 2nd ed. Edited by Terry Anderson

Mobile Learning Innovation in Information Literacy Skills Training

The Mobile Information Literacy (MIL) tool is a user-friendly literacy app to help university students hone their information literacy skills through mobile technology

Implementing Mobile Environments using Learning Objects: The Athabasca University Digital Reading Room

Paper presented at the IEEE WMTE 2005.This investigation determined some of the better strategies for delivering educational resources to mobile devices from the Digital Reading Room (DRR) and the Athabasca University(AU) library catalogue using AirPac, making recommendations on the implementation of Mlearning as part of the AU e-learning strategy. The primary research question addressed in this short paper is What are the limitations and difficulties in delivering course materials to mobile devices

Open access archives and repositories

Governments and research funding organizations are increasingly reluctant to fund research that is not widely distributed and affordable, creating the need for repositories through which scholars can legally distribute their research results and data. Steve Schafer, director of Athabasca University Library, will discuss how open access relates to and enhances library services. Tony Tin, founder of Athabasca University's repository, AU Space, will talk about and demonstrate AU’s growing collection and discuss the challenges and opportunities of self-archiving

Total Variation Regularization of Matrix-Valued Images

We generalize the total variation restoration model, introduced by Rudin, Osher, and Fatemi in 1992, to matrix-valued data, in particular, to diffusion tensor images (DTIs). Our model is a natural extension of the color total variation model proposed by Blomgren and Chan in 1998. We treat the diffusion matrix D implicitly as the product D = LLT, and work with the elements of L as variables, instead of working directly on the elements of D. This ensures positive definiteness of the tensor during the regularization flow, which is essential when regularizing DTI. We perform numerical experiments on both synthetical data and 3D human brain DTI, and measure the quantitative behavior of the proposed model

Information literacy skills on the go

Students’ understanding and integration of information literacy (IL) skills are fundamental to higher education and lifelong learning.  Development and implementation of thirteen mobile lessons application (http://renmil.ca/ ) in the Mobile Information Literacy Tool (MIL) was the result of a unique collaboration between faculty and the library. Lessons demonstrated how to locate, evaluate, and use information effectively. Mixed methods pilot study findings (Hanbidge, Sanderson, & Tin, 2015) informed the Canadian project’s second stage analysis to determine fluency in digital literacy skills and testing of the MIL tool. One hundred and twenty-eight undergraduate Arts students from eight different classes majoring in psychology, social work, English or social development studies participated in the study to determine the effectiveness of using mobile technology to enhance their IL skills.  Preliminary successes and experiences with overcoming the barriers to support anytime, anywhere student mobile information literacy training are discussed and future directions are recommended.&nbsp

The Athabasca University Digital Reading Room: Library resources for mobile students

This project has been designed to test the boundaries of Mlearning and to begin to build a platform for AU to raise an effective m-library. Building on the research conducted in Canada and abroad, the researchers are investigating PDAs and learning objects in order to maximize the potential of Mlearning. What constitutes an effective Mlibrary? Within the limits of this research investigation, an effective Mlibrary must store the contents in a format accessible and configurable by a wide variety of devices and software applications. Special programming is required to implement optimal delivery on a variety of devices and software applications. What resources can be made available in the Mlibrary (content and resource development)? It seems that a wide variety of resource types can be made available on mobile devices subject to formatting limitations. With appropriate programming there are few if any limitations on text displays and only size-comfort limitations on graphics, sound, and video. What are the technical difficulties in implementing the DRR on mobile devices? Because of the difference in the operating systems and the pocket browsers in the PPC and the POS, the CSS stylesheet cannot be implementd in a generic manner. This causes difficulties in designing accessibily/usabilty features for the two different systems

The Athabasca University edusource Project: Building An Accessible Learning Object Repository

Athabasca University - Canada's Open University (AU) made the commitment to put all of its courses online as part of its Strategic University Plan. In pursuit of this goal, AU participated in the eduSource project, a pan-Canadian effort to build the infrastructure for an interoperable network of learning object repositories. AU acted as a leader in the eduSource work package, responsible for the metadata and standards for learning objects. In addition, the team of professionals, academics, librarians and other researchers worked to create an accessible repository of learning objects across university departments and subjects. Most critically, the team worked beyond the development of a learning object repository and considered the adaptation of content and related applications, pedagogical approaches and the use of learning objects by instructional designers, faculty and the learners themselves. This paper describes one institution's approach to learning object repository development, from a technical and pedagogical perspective, along with some of the lessons learned during the process